In just over two months, two of the best-known companies installing solar panels for self-consumption have announced employment regulation files. They are Holaluz and Solarprofit, which in both cases have proposed an ERO on 30% of their workforce, which means 200 and 300 redundancies, respectively.
These are examples of the problems experienced by the photovoltaic self-consumption sector in the last year. After the euphoria of 2021 and 2022, demand has collapsed. In the information sent to the market to present its latest results, Holaluz acknowledged falls of between 25% and 50%. The employer of this sector, Unión Española Fotovoltaica (UNEF), puts the global drop at 60% and the specialized company Otovo assures that it can reach 70%, especially in the residential market. “We are paying the hangover, punctually, of the irresponsibility of many companies that, faced with a doped demand, did not take the appropriate financial or management precautions”, assures Iñigo Amoribieta, director of Otovo.
Using similes from previous crises, companies seem to have sold above their means, with offers and templates to respond to exceptional demand. “What we will see now is a consolidation of companies that have to learn to adjust their business and to resize their workforce based on average demands and not peak times,” says José Donoso, UNEF’s general director.
According to the data from this employer, the demand for photovoltaic self-consumption installations will climb to 5,249 in 2022. That was nearly double the 2,742 installations in 2021 and was well above the 943 installations before the pandemic, meaning they increased nearly sixfold in three years. The end of 2023 will be far from these highs.
The acceleration of these two years is well studied. “In 2021 the electricity bill began to rise with stratospheric charges and this encouraged many families and companies to take the step towards self-consumption. A pressure that has now disappeared”, explains Donoso.
Faced with the 700 euros per MWh that came to mark the price of light in some hours of 2022, this year was launched with a price of zero euros on the wholesale market. A situation that has been repeated after the summer. “This makes people less sensitive to prices. The average has dropped a lot and there are no scary bills like in previous years,” says Donoso.
2023 has also been the year of the recovery of tourism, which, together with the rise in interest rates, has caused families to allocate pandemic savings to mortgage payments or travel and leisure, and that the urgency of putting panels is less.
To this we must add that the attractive hook of public subsidies that launched the Recovery Plan after the crisis has been released. “Most of the subsidies have not been collected yet. It doesn’t mean they don’t get paid, but if the neighbor tells you they haven’t been paid, you reconsider the investment”, explains Donoso.
None of this means that the end of self-consumption has come in Spain. There is still a long way to go. “Of the 3 million single-family homes likely to have solar panels, only a little more than 300,000 have them. The room for growth is very high. But it must be done in moderation at around 150,000 per year, not nearly double, as happened last year”, assures Amoribieta. A manager who has always defended this energy model and who assures that “it is profitable without subsidies”. According to his opinion, this public incentive served to overstimulate demand and led to the entry of many foreign companies into the sector, which led to a great deal of competition without sufficient financial guarantees.
Interested parties are warned. “Now, the installation of solar panels is between 20% and 30% cheaper than a year ago. In January, only the end of the VAT subsidies will imply a minimum increase in the price of electricity of 15% and it will be difficult to see the pre-crisis prices again. When they talk about the price increase on TV it will be too late”, he warns.
