End of year rush to rooftop solar hints at return to boom-times in 2023

First the bad news: Australian rooftop solar installations experienced their first annual contraction in seven years in 2022.

That’s the final verdict from industry analysts SunWiz on what was truly a solar-coaster of a year for the rooftop PV industry.

According to SunWiz data, 2022 finished off at 2.79MW of total installed, putting it 14% behind 2021 and 6% behind 2020 – both of which had their own difficulties.

SunWiz managing director Warwick Johnston says the two largest factors causing this contraction were the east-coast floods, which hampered roof access, and renewed recreation – “where people freed from lockdown spent money on holidays and restaurants instead of home improvement.”

No doubt rising inflation and cost-of-living pressures added to the mix, although there’s a strong argument that persistently high electricity prices are the best rooftop solar incentive going round.

Which brings us to the good news: After collapsing in the first half of 2022, demand for rooftop solar started to bounce back in the second half of the year, promising a “much better start” to 2023 for installations.

Johnston says that while electricity prices were the primary driving factor behind this end-of-year rebound, other important factors also contributed strongly.

Among those other contributing factors was the backlog of installations – delayed by the aforementioned flooding rain – which led to a flurry of activity in December, in a bid to get in before the annual ratcheting down of the federal solar rebate

“Commercial PV systems face greatest pressure to complete installations by December, which is why there was a new record average system size,” Johnston adds.

Whereas residential installations remained steady in November and December, commercial segments grew by between 18-46%, according to the SunWiz data.

All told, the end-of-year rush delivered a 6% jump in month-on-month volumes for December 2022 and the second largest December recorded to date.

Johnston says this was consistent across most states (chart above) and in each key segment, although he adds that “ACT is going gangbusters,” with record installation volumes up 56% for the year-to-date.

Finally, December 2022 also delivered a record monthly average system size of just under 10kW, driven by continuing a surge in the commercial sector – see chart below.