Europe Adds 80 GW Solar in 2026 as Curtailment Rises Amid Grid and Storage Expansion

About 40 terawatt-hours of solar-generated electricity could go to waste in Europe in the coming months of 2026. The figure is up by a quarter from 2025 and is enough to power Greater London for a year. Europe added solar capacity over the past year ending in May 2026, expanding the generation base to roughly 490 gigawatts as of that month.

U.K. and France. Around 80 gigawatts of solar capacity is expected to be added in Europe in 2026, according to BloombergNEF. Overall European installations of new solar capacity are expected to fall slightly in 2026 from the record reached in 2025.

BloombergNEF projects further declines in European solar installations almost every year until at least the middle of the next decade after 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, about 16 percent of solar generation was curtailed in Spain, roughly double the level from the first quarter of 2025, according to London Stock Exchange Group data.

Germany saw solar curtailment increase to around 13 percent in the first quarter of 2026 from 7 percent a year earlier.

Hourly power prices plunged to around minus €500 per megawatt-hour in Germany and France during spring 2026. Negative prices were more pronounced during Easter 2026 and on May 1 2026, which is a holiday in many European countries. When prices fall that far below zero, solar park operators often shut down voluntarily to avoid paying to offload power.

“The assumptions that underpinned solar investments during and just after the energy crisis are no longer holding. Negative prices as well as curtailment are eroding returns,” said Axel Thiemann, chief executive officer of Sonnedix BV. Voltage fluctuations were one of the key causes of Europe’s worst blackout in decades in Spain and Portugal in 2025.

Since the 2025 blackout, grid operator Red Electrica has become more cautious, keeping gas-fired plants online for backup and relying less on solar. 2 trillion of grid investment will be needed by 2040. Storage capacity in Europe is expected to grow fourfold by 2030, according to BloombergNEF.

The German government plans to create incentives to combine solar parks with batteries. On prime agricultural land in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, thousands of hens and chickens roam freely under the 146,000 modules at a Vattenfall solar farm. Vattenfall plans to add batteries to absorb surplus power at its solar farm in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania next year.

“The only way to get out of that dependence and the price spikes that we see is to have more electricity production, grid and flexibility in Europe,” said Anna Borg, CEO of Vattenfall. “Solar panels that cannot feed electricity into the grid do not offset a single ton of CO2,” said Leonhard Birnbaum, CEO of German utility EON.

Michael Schrettle, an analyst at Volue, said subsidies for negative hours will become less common, which could result in fewer extremely negative prices.