Photovoltaic boom in Austria

This roughly corresponds to the output of the three to five largest Danube power plants in Austria.

The industry association Photovoltaic Austria assumes an internal forecast of around 1,200 megawatts. More than 1,000 megawatts peak, i.e. one gigawatt, are considered fixed, as PV Austria said on the APA. The Technology Platform Photovoltaics (TPPV) also assumes an increase of 1 to 1.2 gigawatt peak (GWp). The market analysis company Brancheradar recently estimated the capacity newly installed in 2022 at 1.37 GWp.

“We are seeing dynamics in the photovoltaic market that are exceptional at the moment. As was the case last year, this applies to both residential and open space areas. This development comes from the numbers we need to achieve our national goals very close,” said TPPV boss Hubert Fechner in the industry portal “pv magazine”. His tip for 2022 is “significantly more than 1 gigawatt, maybe 1.1 gigawatts, 1.2 gigawatts or more.” Final figures for 2022 will be published by the Climate Ministry in mid-2023 and by Statistics Austria at the end of 2023.

The boom had already started before the Ukraine war and the energy crisis. In 2021, the newly installed output has already doubled compared to 2020 to 740 megawatts peak. The high electricity prices have given the PV expansion in 2022 an additional boost.

The boom is likely to continue in 2023, as many homeowners who have opted for a PV system will only get it this year. Fechner predicts that Austria will install between 1.2 and 1.5 gigawatts each year between 2023 and 2030.

Representatives of the PV industry are pushing for a rapid expansion of the power grid. In some areas, the grid operators would refuse to feed in new PV systems because the transformer station is at its capacity limit and cannot transport the electricity away.

Big plants

The high prices have also led to the fact that many have planned the systems as large as possible and have installed panels on garden sheds and the like in addition to the house roof. Sometimes even vertically mounted panels can be seen on house facades. These produce good yields, especially when the sun is low in the sky.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), photovoltaics and wind energy are the two most important technologies for stopping global warming caused by burning fossil fuels.