German renewables developer Juwi will cut jobs and reduce its management staff in response to declining margins and “significant economic pressure” in the German renewables market.
The company said it would cut around 280 jobs from its German workforce, effective in October. It will also strip back its management team to just two executives: current CEO, Jost Backhaus, and a new CFO, Thomas Hüsgen. The company’s managing directors for its German and international divisions will both depart in September 2026 and June 2027, respectively.
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The company said the “restructuring” was necessary due to “significant economic pressure across the entire German renewable energy sector”. It blamed intensified competition, falling bid rates in auctions, rising costs, limited grid connections and the resulting decline in margins.
“We are aware that the restructuring and economic transformation of JUWI will entail difficult decisions. We will fundamentally optimise and reorganise divisions and functions. At the same time, we are scaling the size of our business accordingly. As a result, it will unfortunately also be necessary to part ways with some employees,” Backhaus said in a public statement.
The company said it was “primarily relying on voluntary measures to implement the workforce reduction” and that layoffs due to “operational reasons” would only be enacted where they are “unavoidable”.
Backhaus said the change “means a clear focus on viable markets, streamlined business models, increased productivity in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, and greater integration within the [parent company] MVV Group”.
He added that Juwi would be pursuing “new areas of growth”, specifically hybrid solar-plus-storage or wind-plus-storage renewable energy projects, and targeting “large, high-growth markets to leverage economies of scale.”
Renewable energy development in Europe has become more challenging in recent months as power prices for solar, in particular, have fallen and grid infrastructure has not kept pace with renewables buildout. The upshot of this, as PV Tech Premium heard earlier this year, is that pure-play development, particularly in mature markets like Germany, is scarcely profitable. Jan-Philip Kock, chief of staff at German IPP Encavis, told us he expected to see the industry shift in the coming years, with the possibility of consolidation and market exits as firms struggled to adapt.
Developers now need to offer integrated energy solutions and greater flexibility and energy storage capacity. In an interview at the SolarPLUS Europe conference in Milan earlier this year, we spoke with Cristiano Spillati, the MD of Italian developer Limes, about the changing dynamics of development in Europe.
