Australia’s solar market may have fallen off is peaks, but it is still showing healthy growth, with a rising share of commercial based systems, particularly in NSW and South Australia.
This graph, from Green Energy Markets’ latest report, gives a fascinating insight into the state of the market in Australia (you can click on the graph to enlarge).
It gives the installation rate by MW of rooftop solar in each state. Some of the installation will be influenced by the timing of changes to various state-based feed-in tariffs.
But it is clear that Queensland remains the leader, and in recent months has actually accelerated its growth – adding at least 20MW in each of the months of February, March, April and May. At an average installation size of 4kW, that’s at least 5,000 new systems a month.
NSW and South Australia are installing the most commercial-scale solar.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of Renew Economy, and is also the founder of One Step Off The Grid and founder/editor of the EV-focused The Driven. Giles has been a journalist for 40 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.
20MW a month or 250Mw a year is astounding, and the number in Queensland is growing despite cuts to subsidies and FiT, they are adding the equivalent of a small gas power plant or about half a coal , power plant per year just in rooftop installations. Meanwhile a new report shows total demand in the NEM has fallen 3% in the first quarter of 2014, which means solar is supplying an ever growing proportion of an ever shrinking total, the effect of this on the wholesale market will have rapid and profound effects on the ability of coal power plants to remain viable.
Yay! (To your final statement!) But i cant see qld growing. It looks like it might be recovering or stabilising?
March is higher than February and may is higher than March, April was lower than all three but looks like an outlier tp rather than a trend, to my eye 2014 shows a small but steady climb in monthly installations.