It’s that time of the year again when Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator releases the updated data on Australia’s top solar postcodes – the rooftop PV hot-spots of each state and territory that are leading the uptake of residential and commercial solar systems sized between 0-100kW.
As we reported here, Australia’s rooftop solar installations continued on their record-breaking way in October, with 158MW of PV systems installed across the month – 15 per cent more than in the previous record month in August.
According to solar analyst SunWiz, the month saw Victoria join NSW to become the one of the hottest markets in the country, while Western Australia surged beyond the 1GW mark.
But which are the top solar postcodes of Australia?
This year there are some new names that have made the ranks, according to the CER, which has tallied small-scale solar installations for the June to September period.
The CER data reveals that Australian homes and businesses, across all states combined, installed a total of 63,514 rooftop PV systems, totalling 351,833kW in capacity, over the course of the quarter.
Queensland topped small-scale installations with 15,991 for the quarter. New South Wales was a close second with 15,883 systems installed; and of the nearly 5000 commercial solar systems (10-100kW) installed around the country for the quarter, NSW installed the most, with 1507 systems.
Battery storage installations remained fairly slow and steady, although that can be expected to change as state government subsidy schemes in South Australia, Victoria and NSW start to kick in.
For the July to September period, there were 1278 rooftop PV systems that had battery storage installed alongside the solar, taking the total for the year to just over 4,000, as you can see in the table below.
In total, the CER has recorded 11,563 small-scale solar and battery systems installed around the country, to date.
Australia’s Top Solar Postcodes…
In Queensland, Bundaberg has been bumped from its leading position, held for the past two years, by Caboolture – a town and suburb in the state’s Moreton Bay Region, north of Brisbane – which has installed just shy of 16,000 PV systems over the June to September quarter.
NSW has a new front-runner, too, with Port Macquarie – a coastal city half way between Sydney and the Queensland border – installing 15,883 small-scale solar systems.
In Victoria, the leading solar postcode goes to Clyde North, a south-eastern Melbourne suburb that sits next door to one of last year’s top 10 solar postcodes, Cranbourne.
As you can see on the map above, Clyde North leads installations for the current period with 14,259. That is more than 2,000 systems shy of Victoria’s top solar postcode last year, which was Werribee, with 16,929 installs.
But it is a vast improvement on the years before that, when only Queensland and Western Australia suburbs cracked the nation’s top 10.
In Western Australia, the semi-rural southern Perth suburb of Baldivis is leading installations, with 9,487 for the quarter. And in South Australia, Mount Barker leads with 5483 PV systems installed.
In the ACT, the top solar suburb for the 2018 Q3 is Kambah, with 983 installations; while the relatively new Palmerston suburb of Zuccoli, lead installs in the Northern Territory.
And in Tasmania, the beachside Hobart suburb of Blackmans Bay led installations in that state, with 782 PV systems installed.
RELATED READING
Australia’s top 10 solar postcodes, June 2016
Australia’s top 10 solar postcodes, and the top solar locations by state, 2017
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
