Again this year, the SolarPower Europe trade group published the Global Market Outlook 2021-2025 in July 2021, from which we can take a global outlook for the PV industry.
In this article, we want to summarize for you the most important development details listed by SolarPower Europe and take a look together at what could await us in the future.
Solar market booming despite Corona pandemic
As we know very well by now, the Corona pandemic had partly negative effects on growth in different industries. However, this does not apply to the PV industry. Here, demand is still huge. The reasons for this are high demand and increasingly falling costs, with rising costs for oil, gas and coal on the other hand. The now noticeable effects of the climate crisis are also having an impact on demand.
Here’s a quick fact check:
- 39% of new power generation capacity installed in 2020 included PV systems
- one in three power plant units installed in 2020 can be attributed to PV
- the use of solar energy in relation to total electricity generation will increase to 3.1%
Price increases cannot stop the growth of the global PV industry
From SolarPower’s market analysis report, we can see that despite various price increases along the solar value chain, steady growth can be expected in the following years.
If we look back again, last year the European PV Association stated that a growth of 18% in newly installed photovoltaic capacity worldwide to 138.2 GW. Meanwhile, the forecast into 2025 is 1.8 terawatts of fixed photovoltaic systems.
The following diagram from the SolarPower report is intended to illustrate the whole thing graphically once again:
China is the predicted pioneer in the installation of PV systems. Measured was a currently existing addition of 48.2 GW in the whole of China. This accounts for more than one third of the global market. In contrast to China, the USA, Vietnam, Japan and Australia have a much smaller share. In sixth place is Germany with around 4.9 GW of new capacity added in 2020. While there was actually strong growth in all European countries within the PV industry, India saw a decline from 8.8 gigawatts to 3.9 gigawatts of newly installed photovoltaic capacity.
According