In 2017 the PV global market is growing much more faster than the expectations.
New trends of PV global market
The reasons are many: the installations in China; the high demand in USA; the growing market for smart grid in remote areas in Africa; the re-growing European market; the interesting market in India and Latin America.
The approaching to the new grid-parity market for photovoltaic is transforming the PV market: bigger and tendentially more stable.
But in this changing period, there many factors of pressure. In particular:
- shortage of modules and inverters: the producers try to sell the products where they are paid more, and some markets in the world find a lower offer of products
- higher competition with margin reduction: PV market is historically unable to create and maintain the right margin for producers and distributors: probably too much global or too much new and immature
- prices are conditioned by this shortage period
The grid-parity orientation of Italian market
Italian market, where VP Solar is working towards international markets from 1999, could be considered a predicting model of market, oriented to grid-parity. Feed-in tariff and Conto Energia incentives expired many years ago.
The new scenario for Italian PV market is based on a smaller market but more stable.
The focus is the self-consumption: to produce PV energy where the energy consumptions are high, energy systems including storage, charge control, heat pumps.
VP Solar is fully involved in this new approach to PV market, requiring new skills and outcomes, to apply and transfer to resellers, installers and technicians.
The distribution 4.0 requires:
- orientation to new technologies, not only to produce energy, but to use it in a Smart way for factories, buildings and vehicles
- efficient and effective organization in a lean way
- the use of digital instruments for serving the customers in a B2B model
- global activities for benefitting of development areas
