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PV system prices in Germany drop heavily
A survey of turnkey PV on-grid systems in Germany in the April issue of the German edition of PHOTON reveals an average 14 percent price decrease when compared with 2002. On average, a completely installed 2 kW system
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including modules, inverter, mounting and wiring – costs €13,000 ($14,040) after a 16 percent value-added tax.
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Solar Verlag GmbH |
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Whereas less than 1 percent of the systems surveyed were offered at the impressively low price of just
€4,500 ($4,860) per kilowatt, almost 14 percent carried price tags below
€5,000 ($5,400) per kilowatt. The vast majority of the systems, more than 70 percent, ran between
€5,000 and €6,500 ($5,400 and $7,020) per kilowatt. Installation costs ranged between
€273 and €1,667 ($255 and $1,800) per kilowatt.
Like last year, most turnkey kits use modules from BP Solar, Shell Solar and Kyocera. But the distance between the market shares of these top three producers has narrowed, with each company producing just 10 percent of the modules used in the survey. Once again, Spanish company Isofoton came in at fourth place with an 8 percent share, followed by Sharp, whose low price offensive in early 2002 gave especially small German module companies hard times.
Inverter manufacturer SMA Regelsysteme GmbH's dominant market position remains uncontested, although its share shrunk from 75 to 66 percent. The group of manufacturers picking up the remaining inverter business is lead by Fronius International GmbH, which increased its share from 8 to 10 percent. The strongest improvement came from Swiss company Sputnik Engineering AG, which provided its inverters to 6.5 percent of the surveyed PV systems. In fact, if one takes into account that Sputnik also sells its inverters as OEM products to module manufacturer Solar-Fabrik AG, then that total increases to 7.5 percent. The number four inverter manufacturer in the survey was Siemens AG.
The survey covered 232 PV system packages offered by 87 different installers. The actual number of systems available in Germany, of course, is much larger. A company such as SolarWorld AG, for instance, offers about 80 different system combinations, and many installers provide custom-designed systems to fit customer needs. To keep the survey»handy,« it lists a maximum of three products per company and only looks at systems with up to 5 kW
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a power size typically not exceeded for residential rooftop systems in Germany.
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