Recent years have seen rapid developments in solar power. From 2002 to Oct 2010, there are about 4.6 GW new additions of large-scale solar power plants in about 20 countries (large-scale meaning the capacity is over 1.5MW here). Among those new additions, Spain and Germany are the two countries where solar power development is fastest. For example, in Spain in 2008 alone, there is about 1.8GW addition of large-scale solar power plants. Not only the volume of new solar power grows very fast, but also many new solar power plants are large-scale power plants, and some are even comparable with conventional power plants in capacity. Below is a review of new solar power plants’ capacity from 2002 to 2010 for the following countries:
§ Spain
§ Germany
§ Czech Republic
§ USA
§ Italy
In those countries, although the number of larger size (over 20MW) PV solar plants are relatively small, but those plants account for a significant portion of total solar capacity.
The pie charts show the percentage of total capacity of PV power plants for each size category and the percentage of total number of PV power plants for each size category, for the countries mentioned above. Take Spain for an example, on one hand, the PV power plants with capacity of 2 to 5 MW account for 40% in capacity of all PV power plants installed with capacity of 2MW and above during the last 5 years, while they account for over 70% in the number. On the other hand, the PV power plants with capacity of 20MW and above account for23% in capacity and only 4% in number.
Spain:
