The existing EU minimum import prices for Chinese modules and cells are preventing a much-needed downward price adjustment for products of all regions of origin. The prices are still largely stable. Delivery volumes from Asian manufacturers for the European market are, at the same time, being progressively reduced.
The action has, for quite some time, been found on other continents. While module prices for so-called non-EU projects, i.e. photovoltaic plants that are being built beyond the control of the EU Commission and its regulations, are once again (or still) located in the lower 40 eurocent range, prices within the European Union are stagnating just above the 50 eurocent mark.
The high-price policy prescribed by the European Commission is obviously not designed to help European manufacturers survive, let alone grow, in the face of tough international competition. At best it prolongs a slow death by a few quarters. Once successful trading houses and system integrators are continually having to give up, either through bankruptcy or withdrawal from the distribution business. Both the market and the business model itself are breaking down on them. Continuous, reliable supply, interim financing and good service have simply become uneconomical. The few goods that are currently in demand are forging their way ahead, but without the wholesale trade in the classical sense.
After years of growth, Germany will this year probably for the second time in a row see a market decline of at least 30% compared to the previous year. The energy transition is unnecessarily being hindered and delayed. The much-cited cost brake is being applied at the expense of renewable energy and, cynically, at the expense of consumers. Industrial electricity prices have, in contrast to end-consumer prices, not increased over the last ten years, as the German Association of Industrial Energy and Power Business (VIK) has found. Even the German EEG surcharge account is currently well back in the black, although so many energy-intensive businesses continue to be exempt from the levy – the newly introduced participation of self-consumption power plants in the EEG surcharge is therefore likely to be totally unnecessary and counterproductive.
What would save the German and European photovoltaic market is an immediate abolition of the EEG surcharge on self-consumption, the removal of all administrative hurdles for the direct marketing of solar power, the abolition of the minimum price regulation and the restrictions of the import volume for crystalline Chinese cells and modules, and a simultaneous, complete waiver of import tariffs by the EU. At the same time the connection and feed-in priorities could be qualified so that only those photovoltaic plants technically in a position to guarantee the network stability at individual grid connection points may feed in. The solar industry already possesses sufficient strategies and policies to deal with this qualification.