Agencja Rynku Energii (ARE), the energy agency of Poland, has reported that the country reached 11.03 GW of cumulative installed PV capacity at the end of August.
According to the figures released by the agency, the country deployed around 3.36 GW in the first eight months of this year. For comparison, it installed around 3.71 GW in full 2021. “The Polish PV market is dominated by the prosumer segment, which includes all systems not exceeding 50 kW in size,” Piotr Pająk, a renewables reporter for the Gramwzielone website, told pv magazine. “The total capacity of prosumer installations was 8.25 GW in the end of August which means it is 75% of the total PV capacity installed in Poland.”
According to Pająk, recent changes in the country’s regulations for the distributed generation segment have not interrupted its strong growth trajectory. “For new prosumers, net-billing was introduced and any experts expected the new system to be less profitable than the old mechanism – and those voices largely caused a decrease in new prosumer investments,” he stressed. “However, the current huge rise of energy prices in the wholesale market is generating very attractive income for prosumers in net-billing.”
He also stressed that the rise in energy prices is also a driver for PV investments in companies that want to cut their energy bills. “Except for the rooftop segment, the other driver for the Polish PV market is the segment of ground-mounted farms. Partially this segment is still developing thanks to the auction system, but now more and more investors decide to build PV farms outside the mechanism and sell the energy on the market,” he also stated.
Poland had reached 7.67 GW of 3.9 GW of cumulative solar capacity by the end of 2021, 3.9 GW at the end of 2020, 1.3 GW at the end of 2019, and just 486 MW at the end of 2018. The exponential growth recorded last year was mainly due to the growing number of grid-connected solar parks.
The Polish PV market is expected to grow strongly during the current decade to reach 30 GW of installed capacity by the end of 2030, according to the Polish research institute Instytut Energetyki Odnawialnej (IEO).
