The government, which has spent about $199.7 million on the PV incentives since 2007, has yet to decide whether to introduce new incentives after that, Montanino said on the sidelines of a PV conference in northern Italy.
‘Italy is the first large-scale market where it will happen … It is certainly going to be next year,’ Anton Milner, chief executive of Q-Cells said.
Italy’s residential segment of the PV market — the main driver of growth so far — will be the first to reach grid parity, followed by commercial consumers, mostly supermarkets which put solar panels on their roofs in 2012, Milner said.
Industrial-size PV segment was likely to reach grid parity around 2015 mostly due to an expected increase in costs of gas-fired power generation, which accounts for a lion’s part of all electricity produced in Italy, he said.
California in the United States, Spain and Germany are likely to follow Italy in reaching grid parity.
