Households hit the breaks on rooftop solar in June. Will they make a comeback in July?

Australia’s rooftop solar market has hit a mid-year slump, with a sharp decline in monthly installation numbers taking the shine of the record numbers charted in May.

According to the latest data from industry analyst SunWiz, June 2024 national market volumes fell 15 per cent from their highs in May, taking total monthly installations to their lowest levels since January – albeit at a similar level to June 2023.

SunWiz says a total of 248MW of rooftop solar was installed by Australian homes and businesses in June, down from the record-setting total of 292MW registered across the country in May – the largest total for the month of May ever recorded.

Warwick Johnston, SunWiz managing director, says the soft the market for rooftop solar leads, proposals, and sales – discussed in detail here – appears to have now flow through to system registration.

“Lower volumes of leads and customers are factors that do explain [solar] retailer’s complaints about slow business,” Johnston wrote in the analysis last month.

“These are very likely coupled to the broader malaise facing the Australian economy.”

So does this means May was the exception, and June is the correction? Time will tell, although as the below chart shows, both 2022 and 2023 saw a turnaround in installation rates in July.

On a year-to-date basis, 2024 is tracking somewhere between the record year of 2021 – when total installs for the year hit a new high of 3.23GW – and 2023, which fell just short of beating the 2021 record.

Getting back to the data for June 2024, SunWiz notes that all state volumes went backwards in June, with Queensland charting the smallest decline of 12%.

South Australia, meanwhile, suffered a “monstrous 21% drop” in installs for the month, Johnston says, while New South Wales and Victoria weren’t far from the national average decline, at 15%.

The average system size, meanwhile, grew to its highest level yet – 9.9kW – although this could be more reflective of the fact that the residential segment was hardest hit by the decline in installs, thus giving commercial installs a bigger influence over the average system size.

Johnston says there was a 20% decrease in installations of systems sized between 6-8kW and a 15% dip in  10-15kW system installs in June.

Even the “small system counter-trend” that emerged last month, delivering a jump in the number of systems installed in the sub-3kW and 4-6kW segments, was pared back.

“Most of the commercial market went backwards, too,” Johnston says, “but again to lesser extent than those key residential ranges.”

Indeed, the only rooftop PV segment that grew for the month was in 50-75kW commercial-scale systems, the report finds.