“I have to say that large-scale solar in Europe is basically dead,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s (BNEF’s) head of solar, Jenny Chase, told SolarPower Europe’s recent Solar Market Workshop in Brussels, shocking and almost offending many of the senior industry executives present — although some in the audience nodded sagely in agreement.

So how could one of the industry’s greatest success stories be facing such an untimely end? And is BNEF’s view shared by the wider industry?

There is little doubt that Europe’s utility-scale PV market is shrinking.