The high demand for energy in Germany is satisfied by imports of around 75% and according to the International Energy Agency, www.iea.org the annual demand for energy will increase by 59% by 2030.

As Germany finds itself in the position of relying on imports and with the ever rising costs involved, it is vitally important that they look at other means of supply and the obvious choice is renewable energy, i.e. solar power.

Germany has in place attractive incentive schemes which are offered to new solar power users but these incentives are being reduced by 16% in July 2010 and this has sparked a rush of applicants in order to beat the deadline and lock in the old rates.

The government came to the conclusion that the feed-in tariffs were far to generous and this has resulted in fears of job losses and a downturn in the German economy. Even taking into account the reduction in incentives, the German government are still confident that the size of the market will increase year on year.

The old tariffs were the main reason why Germany was the top market for solar power and the country accounted for more than 50% of all installations in the global market which amounted to some 18 billion Euro's.

The price for a solar panel installation on an average home in Germany would be EUR 15,000 and the feed-in tariff was EUR 0.0953 per kWh and this was payable for 20 years at an annual reduction of 5%. When various incentives were added to the installation costs it worked out that the initial investment would be repaid after 12 years. For the rest of the term an attractive profit could be made which compared well against the more traditional forms of investment.

The German FIT law is widely recognised as the best of its kind and a multi billion EUR business ans grown from it. As an example, the financial institutions were at one stage reluctant to lend money to purchase solar systems but the German Government introduced what is known as the '100,000 roofs' programme to assist the solar industry and it proved to be a great success. As a result of this the banks reassessed their lending policy as it was seen to be a solid investment opportunity.

More information can be found at http://www.eurosolar.de with regard to up and coming conferences and events in the solar industry in Germany.