Australian rooftop solar continues to weather Covid-19 storm – at “very healthy levels”

One Step Off The Grid

Australia’s rooftop solar market is managing to maintain “very healthy levels” of growth despite the uncertain start to 2020, with the usual Easter lull delivering the only dint to installation numbers over the past fortnight.

According to the latest weekly insights data from SunWiz, small-scale solar installations have kept up the pace in terms of new capacity registered nationally, with only Good Friday and Easter Monday dampening figures over the past two weeks.

The data shows there is no sign, still, of any major slow-down in installations, as might be expected from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As Green Energy Markets’ Tristan Edis noted here, this could be due to the roughly three-week lag in STC data, between when a system is installed and the registration of the STCs. Or it could be that the industry is so far weathering the storm.

As One Step has reported, the anecdotal evidence about demand for rooftop solar varies – some point to a slowdown in commercial solar due to lack of interest from aged care centres and shopping precincts, others point to growing interest from supermarkets, cold storage providers, food manufacturers and feedlots.

The latest data from SunWiz also shows that growth patterns were also remarkably consistent from state to state, as illustrated in the chart below.

Growth was also consistent across the varying market segments, with a bounce-back in the larger (30-100kW) commercial solar installations, and consistent growth in the 10-30kW segment.

So far this year, 36,638kW of home solar has been installed, compared to just over 9,000kW of small-medium commercial solar, and 7,688kW of larger commercial solar.