Germany will stop subsidising solar energy by 2018 at the latest, its environment minister said Monday after last year initiating a scaling-back of generous state support for the faltering industry.

Peter Altmaier of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union had fought to set a ceiling of solar power capacity above which the government would no longer offer its financial backing. He said Monday that the limit of 52 gigawatts would be reached by 2017 or 2018. Currently solar panels installed in Germany generate 34 gigawatts of power.

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Berlin "has so far invested 216 billion euros ($278 billion) in renewables and the biggest chunk went to solar, the technology which does least to ensure the power supply," said the head of industrial group Siemens, Peter Loescher, in an interview published in the business daily Handelsblatt on Monday.

Germany has seen a wave of solar company insolvencies and the number of people employed in the industry fell to 87,000 in 2012 from 110,900 a year earlier, while sales plummeted by 11.9 billion euros, according to government figures.


http://www.solardaily.com/reports/Germany_says_to_pull_plug_on_solar_subsidies_by_2018_999.html