continue to clearly dominate the solar space – and this won’t change much for the next five years. In 2017, the large-scale ground-mounted segment increased its shares along with the top markets expanding their global footprints. The growth of the major solar markets is primarily based on ground-mounted PV power, even though there are efforts to foster the rooftop segment as well. With electric vehicles and smart cities making stronger inroads after 2020, there is a lot of upside potential. China not only strongly expanded its output to 52.8 GW in 2017 from 34.5 GW in 2016, but also its global market share to 53% from 45%. Its total installed capacity even increased to over 130 GW of which around 100.6 GW are utility scale plants. The other around 29.7 GW are what China calls distributed solar systems (now < 30 MW, earlier <50 MW), which are actually also mostly ground mounted systems, but installed closer to demand centres. The rate of distributed systems strongly increased over the last year, and we will see in the short run also a stronger run for rooftop systems after the Chinese government recently halted the utility-scale fIT programme. However, deploying large volumes of utility-scale solar is much easier to establish than a distributed PV rooftop market, which requires a substantial period of time and a lot of effort to educate consumers, while setting up an effective platform with the right financing mechanisms and technical standards. That’s why emerging markets usually begin their solar chapter with tenders for utilityscale solar and frequently struggle to set up the distributed rooftop segment, even if politicians generally prefer PV on roofs which they consider the natural place for the technology as it avoids any potential conflicts on land use. A good example for such a development is India. Its National Solar Mission officially targets 100 GW of solar by 2022, with 40 GW coming from rooftop solar. But of the 19 GW installed by end of 2017, only 1 to 2 GW are ground-mounted PV power plants.