By MarketsandMarkets

Germany tops the leader board of Photovoltaic (PV) installation market in  the world showing the greatest green energy investment potential in overall Europe led by solar energy, according to MarketsandMarkets.

The U.S. solar PV technology market is the second largest in the world behind Europe. It is expected to grow from 1,000 MW installations in 2010 to 3,000 MW annual installations by 2016, with an expected staggering CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of over 200%.

While supply is catching up demand, investment opportunities still present themselves. But China remains a largest producer and exporter of PV technology products around the globe and is expected to dominate PV market in the coming years as well. This is according to Vasanth Kumar, Market Research Manager of Energy, at MarketsandMarkets.

Germany the U.S.A. and Japan are the leaders in their respective regions in cumulative installation capacity and together they account for 60% of global solar PV installations. But many countries have increased their solar investments and, particularly, PV installations in order to boost the green energy policies. The declining PV prices across the globe is one of the drivers of increasing demand of the solar PV market owing to the many government’s monetary and regulatory support and increasing acceptance of clean technology in the world.

Also, lower operating costs of solar PV plants and lower prices of PV modules are fuelling the growth of solar PV products. European region particularly leads the pack of cumulative installations with market share of whopping 74% leaving Asia-Pacific in the second position with just 14% market share. Report also added that European countries are registering more than 100 annual growth of PV installations led by Germany, Spain, Czech and France.

China’s PV dominance is very clear with the fact that 90% of production is exported to Western countries and again Europe is the target market. China’s government support and being low-cost manufacturing location bring Chinese producers an edge over competition with solar PV prices to less than US$2/MW and is expected to even priced less than US$1/MW by 2016.

While China’s leadership in PV manufacturing is increasingly noticed with 50% of players being in the top 10 global PV producers, China’s cumulative installations are too small with just 2% of market share. However, supply has not been able to meet the demand in some of the regions which is one of the reasons for the higher pricing of solar PV modules in some regions and some regions have lower pricing of PV products. Large retailers are also showing significant interests in selling these products. But profit margins have been eroding in the last 3 years. In light of the underlying market competition, some exporters are also looking for other market opportunities and ways to increase their market competitiveness in order to grab the supply-demand gap.

However, the industry has also some of growth restraints like higher electricity charges deriving from solar energy and lower MW capacity compared to other energy sources. But according to MarketsandMarkets, solar energy players also have other options of CSP (Concentrating Solar Power) technology where at present the U.S.A. and Spain are main leaders holding more than 95% market share on cumulative installations. The future holds good to overall solar products in PV and CSP technology.

MarketsandMarkets (www.marketsandmarkets.com) is a global market research and consulting company based in the U.S.A.