Australia beats 100MW rooftop solar installs for 7th month in a row

One Step Off The Grid
solar rooftop

Australia has installed more than 100MW of rooftop solar for the seventh consecutive month as households and businesses accelerate their uptake of the technology to stave off the soaring cost of grid electricity.

New data from Green Energy Markets shows 109MW was installed in April, down from March but this was expected given the Easter and Anzac Day holidays.

“This is the seventh month in a row that capacity has exceeded 100MW. While April was down on the prior month (March was an all-time record for capacity) it is up 63% on April last year,” says GEM analyst Tristan Edis.

This article was originally published on RenewEconomy’s sister site, One Step Off The Grid, which focuses on customer experience with distributed generation. To sign up to One Step’s free weekly newsletter, please click here.

Comments

16 responses to “Australia beats 100MW rooftop solar installs for 7th month in a row”

  1. RobertO Avatar
    RobertO

    Hi All, Our 76 kW system is about half way, 105 panels installed in three strings but not turned on yet on one building. They have started on building 2 and I suspect they will be turned on about Saturday 12 but more likely on 19 May.

    1. Joe Avatar
      Joe

      Will media be present for the ‘switching on’ ceremony? Go well with your solar power station.

    2. jeffhre Avatar
      jeffhre

      Good news RobertO. Only 99.24 MW till 8 straight months over 100 and on pace for over 1.2GW a year. Amazing! I wish we could turn them on that fast in the US. We sit waiting weeks (at least) for utility company approvals after completion 🙁

      If you get a chance, please come over here and show these guys how to do it the right way.

      1. Ren Stimpy Avatar
        Ren Stimpy

        You could move to CA? I heard the surf’s up and so is the solar.

        1. jeffhre Avatar
          jeffhre

          Are other states allowing utilities to run roughshod over solar this way? I am in Ca. Trying to find a place to snowboard! That’s the best we can do for now, I suppose?

          1. Ren Stimpy Avatar
            Ren Stimpy

            I assumed you were in FL where solar owners really get a rough deal from the utilities and the ‘powers that be’.

            https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-koch-brothers-dirty-war-on-solar-power-20160211

          2. jeffhre Avatar
            jeffhre

            Right “The Sunshine State.” That is ripe with irony?

        2. Steve Applin Avatar
          Steve Applin

          Utilities around the world have learned from the big mistake that utilities in Australia made with allowing anyone who wanted to to install PV.

          PV has ripped a huge chunk out of the profits of the generators and things are only going to get worse for them as batteries become cheaper and rooftop PV continues its march towards being ubiquitous.

  2. George Darroch Avatar
    George Darroch

    The first 5 months of the year put us on track for about 1100MW of installed capacity this year. Huge numbers.

    1. palmz Avatar
      palmz

      I think you can add maybe 500MW to that my bet is currently on 1500MW to 1600MW for installs of under 100KW’s.

      Small commercial installs are going to be big this year.

    2. Steve Applin Avatar
      Steve Applin

      My local shopping centre announced it was starting construction on 2.9 MW of car park solar next month. If this takes off with shopping centres & other facilities with huge roof space and/or car parks then yearly installs will jump to a level that dwarfs anything we’ve seen before.

      1. Ian Avatar
        Ian

        There are apparently 1700 shopping centres with floor space over 1000m2 if each installs 2MW on average that is 3.4GW of solar, not bad, but households still get the PV award!

  3. Steve Applin Avatar
    Steve Applin

    I noticed the APVI has PV installations of 418 MW in March (http://pv-map.apvi.org.au/analyses) , adding up to a total of 645 MW for the March quarter. Does anyone know if this is an error, or did something big happen in March?

    1. Giles Avatar

      Possibly including large scale solar?

      1. Steve Applin Avatar
        Steve Applin

        Possibly, the large scale solar page hasn’t been updated for the March quarter yet. The solar farms co-located at wind farms are coming online too, and at least in the case of Emu Downs the output of the solar farms is counted under wind on both the AEMO data dashboard and NEM watch.

  4. Ian Avatar
    Ian

    Behind the meter solar be it on homes or businesses bats far above its output.

    Consider this for 8 to 10 hours a day distributed solar reduces demand by about 80% of its nameplate capacity. That is 1/4 (roughly) of the profitable demand of grid power.

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