Despite the global cost reduction of renewable energy sources, 2012 has shown a slowdown in the progression of new installations compared to the trend observed over the last five years. The European Union recorded the largest slowdown due to changes in support schemes and reductions in feed-in tariffs. With a freeze of its feed-in tariffs in 2012, Spain has significantly reduced its growth, as well as Italy where a tremendous amount of new capacity was installed in 2011. Germany continued to break records with 7.6 GW of additional PV capacity installed in 2012 and 2.4 GW of wind energy systems. The wind sector was boosted by China and the USA which each installed more than 13 GW of new capacities in 2012. Both countries also installed more than 3.5 GW of PV capacities.
Wind and solar new power generation capacity
