Countries that have some production of fossil fuels but not enough to satisfy the domestic demand of energy are still dependent on imported resources. For this reason, they searched for solutions in the adoption of RES, especially of wind and solar technologies. Exception is the case of Turkey in which case the hydropower is still by far the RES with higher installed capacity.
1.5.2.1 Germany
In Germany the RES market is mainly composed by wind and solar energy with 80% share of total RES. Ever since 1970s Germany focused the RD&D investments mostly on solar power. Recently, the SPP market reached a satisfactory level of development and the RD&D investments are more and more directed also to wind and bioenergy (Figure A1. 3).
The three peaks in the SPP growth rate (Figure 1.5) coincide with: the implementation of the FIT scheme in 2000, which pays 0.52EUR/kWh and gradually decreases by 5% per year; the revision of the FIT rates in 2004 with the increase to 0.57EUR/kWh and decreasing to 0.43EUR/kWh in 2009 and so on until lower rates were achieved such as 0.0671EUR/kWh in 2018; the EU approval of the 18% RES of total electricity consumption target for 2020 [16]. Also, at residential level the SPP adoption rate has been shown to be influenced by distinct financial policies (Dharshing, 2017).
On one hand, the decrease in the SPP module price along with the FIT scheme made SPP more economically appealing (Chowdhury et al., 2014) which made Germany the leader of the SPP market in terms of SPP adoptions. Among the cost components with major impact on the total SPP price which permit to have a lower price in Germany are especially acquisition, installation labour and profit (Seel et al., 2014). On the other hand, Germany was hardly hit by the sharp decrease of the SPP price due to the Chinese overproduction. The phenomenon caused the bankruptcy of domestic manufacturing companies and the disruption of the policy
34
equilibrium also because Germany could not sustain the SPP demand with the domestic production (Yu et al., 2016).
1.5.2.2 Israel
As mentioned in the first section, Israel is highly dependent on fossil fuels, with only 3% share of RES in electricity generation. Hence, the country found in SPP a vigorous solution to start substituting the “dirty” energy especially since it has been scientifically proved that only from rooftop a 32% share of the national electricity consumption could be reached (Vardimon, 2011). Consistent RD&D investments were directed to both academic institutions and start-up companies (Mason and Mor, 2009). The peak in the SPP growth was reached in 2009 thanks to the implementation of FIT in 2008. The value of FIT was of 0.197NIS/kWh and decreased considerably over time but the growth continued to be sustained by the introduction of NMS for all RES up to 5MW in 2013 (IEA, 2016, p. 67). In the past few years the adoption rate returned to the pre-incentives levels probably because politicians continue to support fossil fuel, especially after the discovery of large natural gas reserves in 2009 from which followed the defunding of the national climate change engagement plan (Michaels and Tal, 2015).
1.5.2.3 The Netherlands
RD&D investments in RES are addressed over the years to solar, wind and bioenergy (Figure A1. 3). In fact, we observe that wind and bioenergy always had a great share in RES while solar became significant in the RES portfolio only after 2008 (Figure 1.6) when a FIT scheme was introduced with tariffs around 0.33EUR/kWh for small systems (Vasseur and Kemp, 2011). Before this period the SPP support was given mainly by municipalities and local authorities although with poor success due to inconsistence in policy (Vasseur and Kemp, 2011) and support of other types of RES which nevertheless helped the achievement of the short-term Kyoto and European targets (Guidolin and Mortarino, 2010). However, the efforts of regional support were later rewarded because together with the FIT scheme and other small complementary attractive incentives they increased the technology awareness and facilitated the adoption (IEA, 2013b). Moreover, although the Dutch SPP manufacturing industry is considered rather small at international levels (Vasseur et al., 2013), it remains active and growing and created over 10,000 jobs (IEA, 2016).
35
1.5.2.4 Turkey
Turkey faces a rapid increase in energy consumption in concomitance with a decrease in production which pushes the government to take actions in improving energy efficiency. Thanks to high irradiation solar might just be the solution if proper incentives are offered (Celik, 2006). In fact, in December 2010 a FIT scheme was introduced with a tariff of 0.133$/kWh for household for 10 years and 0.08-0.12EUR/kWh for industry (Dinçer, 2011) which triggered the SPP deployment in recent years (Figure 1.5). In the past few years we observe an increase of solar RD&D share (Figure A1. 3). This seems to facilitate the achievement of the 2023 target of 5GW solar energy which most likely will be reached given the 3.4GW cumulative installed capacity in December 2017 [17]. However, the target is far from ambitious compared with the domestic consumption and more investments and government support should be provided in order to secure a stable market for this technology with great potential in this particularly highly irradiated country and with significant environmental improvement capacities (Adam and Apaydin, 2016).
1.5.2.5 UK
Over the years there have been RD&D investments in all four types of RES: solar, wind, marine and geothermal, in somewhat balanced proportions (Figure A1. 3), although geothermal and marine have insignificant shares of RES installed capacity, while wind and solar are at the first and the second place with approximately 42%, respectively, 31% (Figure 1.6). The public incentive that mostly impacted the SPP diffusion is the FIT scheme implemented in April 2010 which consequently led to the sharp growth rate increase in 2011 up to 120 times higher than the previous year (Figure 1.5). The reduction in tariff the following year discouraged especially project developers of large solar installations who still encounter a financial barrier due to the high cost of the system (Balcombe et al., 2014, 2013; Dusonchet and Telaretti, 2015). In fact, in terms of number of installations the SPP market in UK is mainly composed by rooftop rather than large installations. While in the past it was also true in terms of cumulative installed capacity, recently the SPP market has been supported mainly by large systems whereas small installations are following a rather steady trend [18]. Moreover, instead of complementary markets, the SPP
36
and wind technologies seem to be in conflict and immerged in an uncertain environment due to lack of policy stability (Duan et al., 2014).
1.5.3 Countries with energy mainly produced by imported fossil fuels