Signs of rooftop solar rebound in Sunshine State, as market plays catch-up

Australia’s small-scale solar market regained further ground in the month of June, new data has shown, with homes and businesses installing a total of 226MW of panels on rooftops across the country – a modest 6 per cent increase on the May total of 213MW.

According to the latest monthly report from SunWiz, June delivered the second month in a row of rooftop solar market growth following the big dip in April, when a total of 172MW of new capacity was installed, marking a 26% decrease on the 234MW total for March.

The very small jump in installations in June continues what is expected to be a choppy year for the small-scale solar market (0-100kW) in 2022.

The Clean Energy Regulator had forecast an almost gigawatt drop in total installed capacity for the year – 2.3GW, down from a record breaking 3.2GW in 2021 – due to cost of living increases and economic uncertainty around inflation. But it has also been acknowledged that those same factors could wind up driving more households to invest in cheap solar power.

There is some evidence of this happening in Queensland, where Australia’s ongoing wholesale electricity market crisis is so far hitting the hardest, in terms of costs passed on to consumers.

SunWiz reports a 33% increase in small-scale solar installations in Queensland for the month of June, compared to a 9% increase in NSW. In Victoria, though, installations decreased in June, while the other states and territories remained flat.

Meanwhile, at the the national level, SunWiz notes that at the halfway mark of the calendar year total installations are still tracking 25% behind the figures observed at the same time in 2021. So there’s some catching up to do.

All up, there are currently more than 3.1 million solar PV systems installed around the nation, totalling more than 18GW of capacity, SunWiz says.