5.9GW+ Of Small Scale Solar Installed In Australia

July 2017 Totals – Clean Energy Regulator

Installations of solar panel systems in Australia in July brought the nation’s cumulative small-scale PV total to over 5.9 gigawatts.

The Clean Energy Regulator’s latest issue of Cracking The Small Scale Code indicates 6,139 small-scale renewable energy systems were installed in July, ¹ Installed collective generation capacity for the month was 31,479kW.

The Regulator notes the system installation in July were lower than at June at the time of publishing – 6,139 vs 6,859.

Queensland racked up the highest number of small-scale renewables and commercial solar (10-100kW) installations, with 2037 and 112 systems respectively. 343 commercial solar PV systems were installed Australia-wide in July.

There were 97 instances of batteries being installed concurrently with solar power systems in July. This works out to less than 2% of installations including energy storage.

As mentioned in the recent SolarQuotes auSSII report covering July activity, we registered significant interest in solar quote requests for battery-ready systems during the month (10% of all quotes), but considerably less for solar + storage quotes (6%), indicating Australians interested in battery storage are generally viewing it is a potential future purchase.

Looking back at the CER’s report covering June last year (one wasn’t published for July),  there were 5,293 small-scale systems (22, 661kW collective capacity) and 242 commercial sized small-scale solar PV systems installed nationally for the month.

Comparing June last year to July this year, the number of solar PV systems installed with battery storage more than doubled last month – 42 vs. 96.

Here’s how the states stacked up on total solar PV installation based on the most recent CER data (current as at August 1, 2017)

ACT – 18,164
NSW – 374,864
NT – 7,727
QLD – 521,520
SA – 211,720
TAS – 29,785
VIC – 318,713
WA – 236,229

In total, 1,718,722 small scale solar panel systems were installed throughout Australia at the end of last month. To give you an idea of the pace of the solar revolution, there were just 8,123 installed solar power systems across the country at the end of 2007.

The Clean Energy Regulator’s August issue of Cracking The Small Scale Code (covering July) can be viewed here.