Rooftop solar market bounces back, but are there clouds on the horizon?

Rooftop solar installations on Australian homes and businesses have rebounded over the course of February, new data has shown, offering a much-needed sign of a return to business-as-usual for the sector after a conspicuously slow start to 2022.

The latest monthly report from industry statisticians, SunWiz, shows an uptick in installations over the past month, with the addition of another 217MW of sub-100kW PV systems around the nation, taking the total installed for the year so far to 400MW.

The total installations for February puts the market 18% ahead of January (183MW), but still leaves it 24% behind the year-to-date installation figures from the same time last year.

It was enough of a rebound, however, to put the nation ahead of the figures from February 2020, when Covi-19 first started wreak havoc.

Sunwiz notes that every state and territory around Australia experienced an upturn in volume over February, led – once again – by New South Wales, which charted strong growth of 23%.

But will February’s rebound set the course for the rest of the year?

Maybe not. SunWiz reports that the federal government’s Clean Energy Regulator, which oversees the small-scale renewable energy (STC) scheme that underpins the rooftop market, is predicting installations will “decrease sharply” over coming months.

This is perhaps not entirely surprising, given the current state of local and global turmoil – see floods in NSW and Queensland, the rolling impacts of Covid, and escalating military conflict in eastern Europe.

In just the two months of 2022, so far, there have already been some ominous signs of reckoning for the solar industry, including the shock exit from panel manufacturing by LG.