Page 43 - A Comprehensive Guide to Solar Energy Systems

38 A COMPREHEnSIVE GUIDE TO SOLAR EnERGy SySTEMS

FIGURE 3.1 The European solar PV annual grid connections from 2000 to 2016 for selected countries. Copyright of
SolarPower Europe 2017.

of every three solar jobs was lost over the past year. An impact assessment study by the
country’s Department of Energy and Climate Change found that the incentive cuts could
wipe out up to 18 700 of the UK solar industry’s 32 000 jobs.
The second largest European market was once again, Germany, adding almost exactly
the same capacity as the year before: 1.42 GW in 2016, compared to 1.45 GW in 2015. For
most of 2016, it seemed as if Germany would barely manage to reach the 1 GW mark, but
a year-end rally, triggered by the termination of the FIT for ground-mounted systems up
to 10 MW, resulted in over 400 MW of installations in December 2016. Still, in both years,
2016 and 2015, Germany clearly missed the government’s solar installation target range of
2.4–2.5 GW. Apart from the United Kingdom and Germany, no other European country has
installed anything like 1 GW of solar PV capacity in 2016.
Turkey, the new number three on the European solar map was able to increase PV in-
stallations by nearly 200% to 571 MW, from 191 MW in 2015, finally beginning to deliver
what investors had been hoping for, for years. It is noteworthy that this growth rate took
place despite the massive political turmoil, but the solar return promise is high and local
financing is now available. Turkey had already passed a feed-in tariff law in 2010, but the
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13.3 US cents (KW h) level was too low at the time. The first 600 MW tender round for “li-
censed” solar projects between 1 and 50 MW in 2013 was about 15 times oversubscribed,
but it took until 2016, before the first two systems awarded in 2014 were actually built. The
high license fee has been the main obstacle for these systems. Most of the PV installations
in Turkey belong to the “unlicensed” systems category up to 1 MW, though it is possible to
bundle these projects—the largest PV park in Turkey today, the Kayseri OSB power plant,