Graph of the Day: Energex nearly at 1GW of rooftop solar PV

Nearly three in every 10 households in south-east Queensland now has rooftop solar PV, amounting to a cumulative grid-connected distributed solar capacity of nearly 1GW, network operator Energex has revealed.

Energex – whose network covers the south-east corner of the state, including Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast – released its solar PV report to the end of June 2015 on Wednesday, counting a total of 290,006 households with rooftop solar systems, and a total installed capacity of more than 980MW.

In the past year, nearly 30,000 homes and businesses have added around 140MW of rooftop solar in its network.

As we wrote here at the end of 2014, Energex already boasts the highest rooftop solar penetration in Australia, and quite possibly the western world. In November last year, the combined installed solar on the network accounted for around 13 per cent of all residential consumption, and around half their individual consumption.

As you can see in the graph above, the growth rate has indeed been impressive – up from less than less than 2,000 (almost as many systems as were installed in June 2015, alone) in 2009 to more than 221,000 at the end of June, 2013.

In June this year, 1,945 new PV systems totalling 9.2MW capacity were connected to the network, with a further 2,819 applications received by customers.

Of the rooftop solar systems connected to Energex’s network, 190,427 (587MW) are connected on the premium feed-in tariff scheme (44c/kWh) – a fall of just over 10,000 in the past 12 months. A total of 97,166 (359MW) are connected on the retail FiT scheme, and 2,413 are non-FiT systems, totalling 33MW, the report said.

The average capacity of systems earning the 44c/kWh FiT is 3.08kW, while the average capacity for the retail funded-FiT is larger at 3.70 kilowatts, Energex said. The average capacity of systems not on a FiT scheme is 13.8kW.