This year’s Intersolar and EES Europe, held at the same time, followed by numerous conferences, symposiums, workshops and presentations attracted many distinguished guests, experts and opinion makers from different sectors (energetic, business, banking, informatics, environmental etc.)
The general director of IRENA (International Renewable Energy Agency), Mr. Adnan Amin considers that change of energy mix is necessary since we have reached the end of economic model that is not anymore able to produce the productivity, employment and income generation, required by world’s growing population. The transition should come with new forms of producing and distributing energy. Currently, there are 25 markets in the world with competitive solar energy market. It is not only the future of sustainable and clean energy but also the future for sustainable economic growth with generation of jobs and income. According to Mr. Amin, Germany represents a role model of energy mix change and carrier of reorganization of energetic sector in terms of infrastructure change, storage innovations, testing, distribution and business models etc. At the moment, Germany has 1.3 million households and companies generating electrical energy. It is expected that 80% out of 1.5 GW of planned new installed capacities will be in the residential sector. The rest will mainly attract small companies investing into solar systems for self-consumption. For less developed markets, these estimations certainly represent a trend that will follow.
The industry is shifting its focus towards intelligent systems, grid integration and energy storage. According to industry association SolarPower Europe, 40 gigawatts of new PV capacity were added worldwide last year to reach a total global capacity of 177 GW. This is hardly surprising if we consider that, in two years’ time, generating electricity with PV is expected to be cheaper than power supplied by utilities in 80% of countries worldwide. In Germany, low costs have made on-site consumption an attractive method for residential homes and industry. According to the current price index of the German Solar Association (BSW-Solar) solar storage systems with capacity up to 10 KWh are now 26% less expensive than they were last year. Significant growth in solar power is making it all the more important to ask ourselves how these quantities of renewable, decentralized and fluctuating energy can be integrated into the currently centralized power supply system.