Swedish Energy Agency revises statistics: new additions for 2016 totaled 79.2 MW

Swedish energy agency Energimyndigheten has published new statistics that reveal that the newly installed PV capacity for 2016 was not only 13 MW as it reported in April, but approximately 79.2 MW.

The new report is based on sales data, while data released in April was based from figures from the grid owners, explains the author of the new report Johan Lindahl, who is responsible for writing the IEA-PVPS report about the Swedish PV market. “When the data from the grid owners is examined closer, it is obvious that some PV systems are missing,” Lindhal wrote.

According to the new numbers, the Swedish solar market grew by 63% in 2016 compared to a year earlier, when new installations had reached 48.4 MW.

The country’s cumulative PV capacity at the end of 2016 was therefore 205.5 MW and not 140 MW as reported in April. This 205 MW is able to generate around 190 GWh per year and cover approximately 0.13% of Sweden’s power demand.

The new report also reveals that average prices for PV systems up to 500 kW registered a drop ranging from 6% to 10% last year. Systems with a capacity of up to 5 kW saw their price decrease from 15.1 SEK ($1.8)/W in 2015 to 15.0 SEK/W in 2016, while that of PV systems ranging in size from 5 kW to 15 kW declined year-on-year from 13.2 SEK/W to 12.3 SEK/W. PV systems with a capacity between 15 kW and 100 KW, on the other hand, registered a price drop from 11.8 SEK/W to 11.6 SEK/W, while price for PV installations from 100 kW to 500 KW decreased from 10.6 SEK/W to 9.2 SEK/W.

Of the cumulative installed capacity, 181.1 MW is represented by grid-connected distributed generation PV installations, while only 11.6 MW comes in the form of ground-mounted solar plants. Another 12 MW is for off-grid domestic and non-domestic PV systems.

The reason for the limited success of solar parks, the report explains, is that there principally are no support schemes for large PV parks in Sweden, except for the green electricity certificate system. “Big PV parks therefore basically must compete with the spot prices of the Nord Pool spot market,” Lindahl wrote.

According to provisional figures provided to pv magazine by Lindahl in early September, the installed capacity of PV systems connected to the Swedish grid that have received approval to operate in this market has increased from 49.1 MW at the end of 2015 to 94.3 MW at the end of last year.