“A victim of your own success”: how price cannibalisation could create opportunities for European power

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“It forces us, as an industry, to think about what we want to be,” said Jan-Phillip Kock. Image: PV Tech

Making new investments into grid infrastructure could be a method of reducing the impact of price cannibalisation on the European energy grid, according to speakers at Solar Media’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe event this afternoon.

Speakers at the panel, ‘How Will European Solar Respond to Power Price Cannibalisation?’, discussed how companies and investors can minimise the impacts of price cannibalisation, the phenomenon where an abundance of available renewable power supply exceeds demand, causing power prices to collapse, and undermining their own success. This is particularly threatening in the solar sector, where solar farms in an area all, by definition, produce more electricity at the same time, pushing this abundance higher.

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The Institute for Energy Research (IER) has published figures on the capture rate of European markets, a measure, as a percentage, of how much money a producer can make from selling electricity. The IER estimates that Germany, Europe’s top solar producer, recorded a capture rate of 94% in 2023, but warns that this could fall to 80% by 2026 and less than 50% by 2029.

“The solar capacity grows much faster than the system’s ability to take it in,” said Riku Merikoski, a senior power analyst at Axpo, and one of the panellists, who pointed to a lack of effective grid infrastructure as a key contributor to this phenomenon.

“I think this will get much worse, and I think some of us will get wiped out because of cannibalisation,” Merikoski added, suggesting that a lack of financial viability for the power generated by renewable projects could pose an existential threat to the solar sector. “I’m quite certain about that, and it’s a maturing of the industry.”

This latter point was echoed by several other panellists, who suggested that such a challenge is to be expected in a sector where the capacity for renewable power generation has increased much faster than the legacy grid and storage infrastructure needed to manage this power.

“It’s definitely something [where, in] long term, you’re a victim of your own success,” said Sulaiman Ilyas-Jarret of the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and another speaker. “In policy, we think about it in terms of the impact of our support schemes on price cannibalisation, and how we can improve the quality of our support schemes.”

“We’re trying to make the contracts for difference (CfD) more flexible and more dynamic, and not undermine the key benefit of the CfD, which is stability,” Ilyas-Jarret added, pointing to the success of government support schemes in the UK energy sector in particular, and how the government is aiming to continue this success, despite the risk of cannibalisation.

“It forces us, as an industry, to think about what we want to be,” said Jan-Phillip Kock, investment strategy manager for Encavis AG and another panellist, who suggested that the challenge of price cannibalisation has created an opportunity for the European power sector, which can now focus on issues of financial viability and balancing supply and demand, rather than simply expanding capacity for its own sake.

2 December 2025
Málaga, Spain
Understanding PV module supply to the European market in 2026. PV ModuleTech Europe 2025 is a two-day conference that tackles these challenges directly, with an agenda that addresses all aspects of module supplier selection; product availability, technology offerings, traceability of supply-chain, factory auditing, module testing and reliability, and company bankability.
3 February 2026
London, UK
Returning in 2026 for its 13th edition, Solar Finance & Investment Europe Summit will bring together the brightest minds representing funds, banks, developers, utilities, government and industry across Europe and the UK on a programme that is solutions-focused from top to tail. The event is designed to enable leaders at the forefront of solar investment and deployment in Europe to scale, learn and land themselves industry defining partnerships.
10 March 2026
Frankfurt, Germany
The conference will gather the key stakeholders from PV manufacturing, equipment/materials, policy-making and strategy, capital equipment investment and all interested downstream channels and third-party entities. The goal is simple: to map out PV manufacturing out to 2030 and beyond.

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