Australia’s rooftop solar market has overcome a year of massive and unprecedented disruption to chart year-on-year growth of a massive 39 per cent and record almost 3,000MW of new installations over the course of 2020, new data has shown.
InĀ its latest annual assessment of the rooftop solar market, market analysts SunWiz found that the industry had sidestepped the Covid-19 pandemic weaved around tricky government policy settings to end 2020 with its strongest ever rate of new rooftop solar installations, with virtually every Australian state and territory recording the highest level of new small-scale installations in December.
“The year ended on a massive high, with a record-smashing 324MW registered in December,” said SunWiz managing director Warwick Johnston. “Over 100MW of this was in NSW, and every major state contributed a record monthly tally.”The capacity registered in the sub-100kW STC market fell a whisker short of 3GW, at 2.97GW. However, when you add in the commercial LGC rooftop market, well over 3GW of rooftop capacity was installed in 2020.”
The data shows the trend towards larger rooftop solar installations continued throughout 2020, with growth in commercial-scale installations and a shift towards larger residential rooftop systems as prices continued to fall. The average home solar system size now nears 9kW.
“As occurs each year, average system size also skyrocketed in December, as solar companies rushed to complete commercial installations before the STC subsidy reduced. COVID impacted commercial solar far greater than residential solar, so businesses servicing this segment will be glad of the strong end to the year,” Johnston said.
