New solar PV installations in Germany added up to a total of 379.955 MW or 380 MW in the month of April 2020. Despite COVID-19 that means growing demand from 368.28 MW in the previous month which is an adjusted number compared to 367.82 MW the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) earlier shared for March 2020 (see Germany Installed Over 367 MW Solar In March 2020).
The major contributor was the rooftop solar PV segment adding over 318 MW to the total while utility scale projects added little over 23 MW, compared to over 27 MW last month.
Since the beginning of 2020, solar installations in the month of April are the highest by far and grew also quite a bit over 291 MW installed in April 2019.
In Q1/2020, Germany added over 1 GW of new PV capacity and with the April additions, between January 2020 and April 2020 the country reportedly installed 1,479.47 MW.
The month of March 2020 was significant for Germany as the country finally crossed the 50 GW milestone for cumulative solar installations and the development was followed in May by the government agreeing to remove the 52 GW cap for incentives under its feed-in-tariff (FIT) arrangement. The fear of the 52 GW not being removed was likely also the reason for the rather strong demand in April despite the COVID-19 restrictions on businesses. However, unlike a number of other European countries Germany was never fully in lockdown situation.
With the addition of April 2020 installations, Germany's aggregate installed capacity reached 50.66 GW.