Germany added 212.46 MW of new solar power capacity in May 2017. With this, its cumulative PV capacity touched 41.8 GW. The capacity for the month of MW includes 76.4 MW from solar parks, according to the German Federal Network Agency.
This is a good jump from the 111 MW added in March 2017 and in April, when PV registrations reached 131 MW, including 13 MW of tender systems. As the German regulator counts registrations, the numbers are changing over the year as investors interestingly sometimes register the capacity even months after the actual installation.
In May, around 50 medium-size solar power systems in the range of 500 kW to 750 kW were added. The number of systems above 100 kW even exceeded 180. But the largest amount of the 6,589 newly registered systems were below 100 kW. In total, 136 MW of systems up to 750 kW were registered. Systems larger 750 kW need to be tendered in Germany.
With the German PV tender scheme starting in April 2015 – and a total of 450 MW tendered in 2015, it is expected that many of these up to 10 MW large ground-mounted systems will be installed this year. Investors have 2 years time to register their tender system before they have to pay penalties and are usually waiting as long as possible with installations as they hope to profit from falling module prices.
Recently, the German government announced it will continue cross border auctions after a first PV pilot took place with Denmark (see Germany To Continue Cross-Border Auctions).