The Netherlands may add another 3.3 GW of new PV capacity in 2022, which would be enough to bring its installed solar power to a total of 17.6 GW.
This emerges from new numbers released by the country's state-run Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RVO) agency, which reveals that, if the above-mentioned numbers will be confirmed by actual deployment, all PV systems installed in the country may cover more than 12% of its electricity demand. The RVO cites examples of projects where solar is not finally deployed , such as owing to rooftop constructions found to be unsuitable for solar modules, or where new projects are not immediately connected due to grid congestion.
Moreover, the RVO reported that the installed PV capacity reached 14.4 GW at the end of 2021, when solar accounted for around 9.3% of total power demand. Most of this capacity – 8.6 GW – comes from systems exceeding 15 kW, with the remaining 5.8 GW represented by smaller installations.
Furthermore, the agency said around 3.5 GW of new PV installations were connected to the grid in the Netherlands in 2021. This exceeds by around 200 MW the data released by the Dutch Central Agency for Statistics in March, when the newly installed solar capacity was estimated at around 3.3 GW.
The SDE++ program for large scale renewables continues to be the main driver for planned and contracted PV capacity in the country.
A recent report from the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) stated that the Netherlands could reach up to 132 GW of PV by 2050.
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The 3.5 Gigawatts growth of new solar capacity in 2021 in Netherlands has already been published by the official CBS statistics bureau on May 31, 2022. At that time, year growth for 2021 was 3469 MW, end of year volume was established as 14418 MW. However, as usual, those numbers are still, formally stated as such by CBS, preliminary. In the recent history of Dutch solar statistics, “early” published end-of-year accumulation numbers have always been upgraded in later updates by the national institute. Even the numbers for 2020 still can be changed.