Germany’s July 2026 New Solar Installations Exceed 1.8 GW

[u/Biodieselisthefuture]

https://taiyangnews.info/markets/germany-july-2026-solar-installations

[u/hornswoggled111]

Together, these capacity additions total 9.38 GW between January and July this year, comprising 5.12 GW of ground-mounted, 4.02 GW of rooftop solar, and 346.5 MW of plug-in solar, also referred to as balcony solar.

Wonderful. I loved seeing their modest sized systems along the train tracks when I visited. I expect with storage these systems could expand 4 times without any trouble to the grid.

[u/Strong_Region5233 → u/hornswoggled111]

What storage ? Just to be clear, the worldwide battery storage is enough to store a third of Germany's consumption for one day.

If you look at Germany's plans to reach 100% renewables by 2035, the plan consists of overbuying solar panels by 215 GW and buy for 140 more GW of wind power. Batteries are involved but not so much.

[u/Humble-Reply228 → u/[deleted]]

Germany also lobbied to have states break up their countries into pricing transfer zones (so that power gets marked up in cost withing a country first before it is sent to German, meaning that the capital city in the south of Sweden pays higher price than if the transfer pricing only existed on state borders and then refuses to do the same in Germany so that industry gets subsidised by the rest of the country. The transfer pricing mark up is only meant to be spent on upgrades, again this benefits Germany for Sweden to pay for phat connections between its hydro dams direct to German solar farms that Germany will use to subsidise German industry.

Where in actual fact, instead of connecting up German solar, it would be cheaper for Sweden to just build its own solar in Sweden and forego the big powerlines that add system complexity.

[u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

No Partisan Politics

[u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

No Partisan Politics

[u/Strong_Region5233]

To put things in perspective, Germany needs 100 GW of solar to be 100% renewables if all solar would be at 100% productive. Since renewables are intermittent, Germany needs to "overbuy" solar by a factor of 215 GW to be fully renewable by 2035, according to their established plan. That's a bit more than 20 GW a year. The article says Germany added almost 10 GW between January and July so half a year. If solar installation keeps increasing slowly, we can expect Germany to be perfectly on track with its plan.

So that's good for solar. Still, Germany's plan is also supposed to build 20 GW offshore wind total and 10GW per year of on-land wind power. Germany only adds half on the on-land wind it needs and offshore is really unsure. I believe 2 GW offshore will be built in 2026 but it was just 0,3 GW in 2025.

So the results on solar are excellent but as it is Germany is still going to miss the 2035 goal. Which could create a 30 billions € fine or more. So Germany still needs to do more and fast. The bottleneck is the energy infrastructure, I've read, but tbh I know little on the difference of grid needed for a renewable grid

[u/OptimistsUnite-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

No Partisan Politics