Very big solar sets record year of growth in 2022, as developers focus on size

Rooftop solar is so often the star of Australia’s PV scene, with world leading uptake and contributions to the grid. But in 2022 it was big solar’s time to shine, with a record year for large-scale solar farm energisation offsetting a rare contraction in the small-scale market.

According to the data from the annual solar round-up by SunWiz, 2022’s large-scale market grew to its second-best volume to date – not due to a larger number of solar farms coming online, but due to some much bigger individual projects powering up.

SunWiz managing director Warwick Johsnton says 2022 wound up delivering the largest annual volume of 200MW-plus solar PV projects commissioned to date for Australia, as projects in the solar pipeline got bigger and bigger in line with rapidly expanding federal and state renewable energy targets.

“2022 was the year that rooftop solar contracted markedly for the first time in seven years. Were it not for
the solar farms that were commissioned, it would have been a year of overall decline,” Johnston says.

“However, thanks to the generation from multiple solar farms exceeding 200MW in size, the overall industry posted some growth.”

Johnston says that alongside the high number of 200MW-plus projects commissioned, there was also a healthy volume in the 100-200MW range, though this was smaller than in most recent years.

At the other end of the scale, however, there were far fewer projects in the 5MW-100MW range than in any year since 2014, according to SunWiz.

Among the big solar projects behind the record year of growth in 2022 are the 400MW Western Downs project in Queensland, and the 200MW Blue Grass Solar Farm near the town of Chinchilla, also in Queensland.

As RenewEconomy reported in November, the output of large scale solar farms also set a new record in 2022, pushing past 5,000 megawatts for the first time on Australia’s main grid.

The new record of 5,247MW, or 5.25GW, was reached at 1220 AEST on Friday, November 22, and was a big leap from the previous instantaneous peak of 4,934MW set a couple of weeks earlier.

At the time, large scale solar was contributing 19.1 per cent of the total generation on the National Electricity Market, although it was little more than half of the estimated output of rooftop solar at the same time – 10.3GW or 37.1 per cent of total generation.