Germany Notes - Concluding Overview

Solar Fabrik's Headquarters in Freiburg. 

Today, I finished reviewing all of my meeting notes from my time in Germany. I wanted to take today's post and review the topics in Germany I would like to revisit after review my notes from the other countries.

While in Germany, I focused on a few main topics: the repercussions from the feed-in tariff (FIT) policy, the methods of managing intermittency, and renewables' and renewable policy's effect on the Germany electricity market.

The last topic – the effect on the electricity market – lies at the interface of the FIT policy and the ways of managing intermittency.

Some of the lessons learned from Germany are applicable across all markets, such as some of the technical solutions to managing intermittency. Other lessons like the affect of the FIT are more unique to Germany and those countries that adopted a similar FIT.

However, as many countries ponder the myriad of policy options to grow a solar industry, they will look to the state of Germany and other countries that adopted the FIT to understand the possible outcomes of such a policy. The most important policy, regardless of whether it is a FIT or not, is a volumetric reduction, which reduces the subsidy as the volume of projects expands. This forces the market to lower costs and become more efficient as it grows.

After reviewing my notes on Spain, Australia, China, India, and Chile, I will revisit these topics in more detail. There will actually be a lot to blog about since I wrote the least about Germany while on the fellowship. There are some really exciting things to discover in the German electricity market and many exciting things to learn about managing intermittency!  It will be a few weeks until these topics are revisited so STAY TUNED!

Creative solar architecture at a community center in Freiburg.