Instal­la­tions of small-scale rooftop solar pan­els reached 2.13GW in cal­en­dar 2019 – a jump of 35 per cent over the pre­vi­ous year – after a record surge in the month of December.

Accord­ing to indus­try sta­tis­ti­cian Sun­wiz, 220MW of small scale rooftop solar was installed in Decem­ber – near­ly 10 per cent above the pre­vi­ous record lev­els in Octo­ber and Novem­ber, and despite the usu­al slow­down around Christmas.

The surge in Decem­ber took the cumu­la­tive total in Aus­tralia to 10.2 gigawatts – installed on 2.3 mil­lion dif­fer­ent build­ings (most­ly homes). And the boom won’t stop any­time soon, with the Aus­tralian Ener­gy Mar­ket Oper­a­tor, the Clean Ener­gy Reg­u­la­tor (and now the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment) expect­ing the total to reach more than 25GW by the end of the new decade in 2030.

Small scale rooftop solar is defined as instal­la­tions of 100kW or less – and which qual­i­fy for an upfront rebate (which are being wound back each year and which will be elim­i­nat­ed by 2030). Larg­er rooftop solar sys­tems oper­ate under a dif­fer­ent scheme, along with util­i­ty-scale solar farms.

Accord­ing to Sun­wiz, the com­bined total of solar – both small scale and large scale reached 3.3GW in 2019, although the large scale fig­ures for the lat­est month have yet to be added. In 2018, the fig­ure was 3.6GW with a much high­er amount of large scale additions.

In the last month, NSW led the way for small scale rooftop solar with a new record for any state of 2, fol­lowed by Queens­land with 59 and Vic­to­ria with 43MW.

Queens­land remains the over­all leader with 2.9GW of small scale rooftop solar instal­la­tions, fol­lowed by NSW with 2.4GW and Vic­to­ria with 1.99GW. That state will like­ly have bro­ken through the 2GW bar­ri­er in ear­ly January.

South Aus­tralia and West­ern Aus­tralia also have more than 1.2GW.

The aver­age size of the rooftop solar sys­tem has grown to 8kW – thanks to the grow­ing inter­est of small and medi­um sized busi­ness who are adding solar in increas­ing num­bers to reduce their elec­tric­i­ty bills.

Full arti­cle: https://reneweconomy.com.au/australia-rooftop-solar-installs-total‑2 – 13gw-in-2019-after-huge-december-rush-34613/