Marktstammdatenregister · Fraunhofer ISE · real data
Germany's quiet solar & battery build-out
Six million rooftops and a wall of home batteries. In 2025 solar overtook lignite for the first time — but the sun doesn't shine on demand.
Scroll ↓
Marktstammdatenregister · Fraunhofer ISE · real data
Six million rooftops and a wall of home batteries. In 2025 solar overtook lignite for the first time — but the sun doesn't shine on demand.
Over six million of them are now bolted to houses, barns and fields — from garden-shed modules to arrays the size of a tennis court.
A sheet of silicon cells that turn sunlight straight into electricity — no fuel, no moving parts. A small box called an inverter turns it into the current the grid uses. Every panel is rated in watts: the power it makes in bright midday sun.
The line is Germany's installed solar capacity in gigawatts (GW) — the fleet's maximum output in bright sun, a measure of power, not yearly energy. Scroll through it: the build-out advances year by year, and each policy moment appears as it lands. Faint lines show France, Sweden and Denmark for scale.
The Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) guaranteed solar a fixed feed-in tariff for 20 years. A market was born from almost nothing.
The 2004 tariff boost met collapsing module prices. Rooftops filled fast: by 2012 the panels could together produce about 33 GW in full sun — more installed solar than any other country at the time.
Worried about cost, the government cut tariffs and set a 52 GW cap. The boom cooled into a long plateau.
In June 2020 parliament scrapped the 52 GW cap. The ceiling was gone; expansion could accelerate again.
The Green-led coalition's Easter Package set a 215 GW-by-2030 target. Solar passed 127 GW, and home batteries began their own boom.
Put together, Germany's solar fleet is no longer a green footnote. In 2025 photovoltaics generated about 87 TWh and, for the first time, produced more electricity than lignite — the coal that powered the country for a century. Solar alone now covers 16.1% of German electricity; renewables together reach 55.9%.
Notice the flip. Solar now has more installed capacity than wind — but capacity isn't power. Below, each source's share of Germany's generating fleet (light) sits beside its share of the electricity actually produced (colour).
Only solar makes less than its size suggests — nearly half the capacity, under a quarter of the power. And sunshine is lumpy: on clear summer days the panels already make more at noon than the country can use. In May 2025 wholesale prices fell below zero for 130 hours, yet large grid batteries still hold only ~2.7 GWh — a rounding error next to 100+ GW of solar.
So the bottleneck has moved. It is no longer how many panels Germany can add — the target is 215 GW by 2030, and they will keep coming — but whether storage, grids and flexible demand can catch the midday flood and release it after dark. The generation is built; the next decade is about the flexibility to use it.
Every registered solar unit, rolled up to its county or federal state. Switch the geography and the measure — units, total capacity, or per person, which strips out the effect of population. The map and the ranking are linked by the curves; click any county or state to open its detail.
Units — the number of separate installations. Capacity — their combined power, in kilowatts (kW): what they can make at once in full sun. Per person divides either by the county's population.
Capacity & generation: Fraunhofer ISE · energy-charts. Units & postcode map: Marktstammdatenregister (Bundesnetzagentur) via mastr_pull.py. Map geometry: tdudek/de-plz-geojson. 2025 figures & negative-price data: Fraunhofer ISE / pv-magazine.