Leadership Profile: Tom Werner (Part 8)

Wednesday, April 18, 2007 | 2 comments

Germany has a political environment, influenced by voters, which is very supportive and progressive about solar energy. This has resulted in creating a very large and solid marketplace which SunPower has been able to capitalize on.

SM: What has been driving Germany’s big focus on solar? Is that part of their energy policy? TW: When you begin discussing energy production today, you encounter people’s concern with global warming and their concern with energy security and the cost of fossil fuels. The combination of those factors eventually cause the people in government, as well as the people in utilities, to take notice and create policy to reflect people’s opinions.

In Germany you eventually had a tariff which stated if you produced solar power, the government would pay you for it and they would do so at a rate which made it not only economic, but also a good investment. Not only was it a good idea for somebody to put it on their house where they would have a meter which monitored how much power they produced and would end up getting a check from the utility, but even farmers started to realize they could supplement their income, or even make more money, by putting a solar power plant on their property and selling the energy back to the utility company. It was essentially the feed-in tariff which was implemented in early 2004, that really started their growth.

SM: Is Germany the only country that has the policy and grid to implement something like this? TW: The other large market was Japan, at the time they were actually the dominant market. They are run a bit differently, materially similar to California, in that they would supplement or reimburse the capital investment to buy the system.

Germany came up with a unique approach, and the predecessor system was really a capital rebate. In Japan their policy was successful. They were really the pioneer in solar energy, and that has resulted today in a large solar market which does not have incentives to speak of. They had a ten year approach which was successful. Germany took a different approach and has become a bigger market than Japan.

California has also come online with the California Solar Initiative, which in January of 2006, was approved. California over the course of 2006 and 2007 has become a significant market as well. Their approach is similar to Japan in that it is a capital rebate.

This segment is part 8 in a 12 part series Segment 9 →
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