Australia’s position as a global leader in solar is “at risk,” a leading industry expert has warned, as a nation-wide drag on the commissioning of new large-scale PV projects slows capacity growth and jeopardises national climate targets.
The warning was issued this week by UNSW professor and APVI secretary Renate Egan, with the release of the latest annual ‘Trends in Photovoltaic Applications’ report from the International Energy Agency’s PV Power Systems.
Egan, who contributed to the report as Australia’s representative to the IEA PVPS Executive Committee – a role she has now stepped down from – says that while Australia still leads the world on solar capacity per capita in 2022, it saw a drop in total installed PV to 4.2GW, down from 4.9GW in 2021.
Egan says the slow-down in large scale solar installations was largely due to grid-connection challenges and delays in planning and consents.
“[This] puts our PV leadership at risk, as well as our progress towards our net-zero targets,” she says.
“Australia has remained in the top 10 countries for every year of the last 10 years, and for a decade before that, by both new installations and total installed installed capacity. This is a benchmark we can be proud of and is reflected once more in the highest installed solar per capita.
“We need a national ambition and co-ordination between states to continue to deliver on our strong solar history, and to open up new opportunities in local manufacturing, in green steel, green ammonia and green hydrogen.”
Egan, who leads the UNSW’s activity in the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics – and has 20 years experience in solar cell manufacturing – is a strong advocate for Australia to establish its own solar supply chain, is a global market being squeezed from all angles by soaring demand.
Earlier this year, she was named as the co-chair of the Australia-India Solar Task Force, a push for major clean energy cooperation deals between the two nations that could include local PV module manufacturing.
In an interview with RenewEconomy last year, Egan said that with Australia’s 4GW a year market for new capacity, it was “not unrealistic” to aim for a gigawatt of local manufacturing.
“It doesn’t make sense for everybody to do everything,” she said at the time; “there’ll be elements of the supply chain where we will be able to do more, and we’ll be good at it, while there will be other parts that don’t add up economically.”
Egan has also flagged strong potential for Australia to excel in silicon refining, which could then be shipped away for conversion into wafers and cells, and then shipped back for the module manufacturing to be done domestically.
The 2023 Trends in Photovoltaic Applications reports reveals that in 2022, Australia ranked 5th in countries for cumulative distributed PV installed capacity (19.59GW) and 9th for distributed PV (2.83GW) – and is one of the few countries where the rooftop solar segment is driving overall market growth.
Globally, the five leading individual countries – China, US, India, Brazil and Spain – represented around 69% of all installations recorded in 2022, while the top 10 markets cover around 81% of the 2022 annual world market, a sign that the growth of the global PV market has been driven by a limited number of countries yet again.
Sophie is editor of Renew Economy and editor of its sister site, One Step Off The Grid . She is the co-host of the Solar Insiders Podcast. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.