SunWiz, an Australian solar consultant, has released its annual Australian PV Report for 2023, finding that the residential solar industry has dropped off while other sectors are soaring ahead.

The residential PV market was one of the worst-performing in the country with small-scale technology certificate (STC) registration falling 14% on the previous year.

“This was driven by people shifting attention to recreation away from home improvement projects, until electricity prices made front page news due to the war in Ukraine,” SunWiz managing director Warwick Johnson writes.

“Victoria was particularly hard hit, with a 23% decline in STC registration. By contrast, the much smaller ACT market grew by 56%.”

Via SunWiz

He adds that some residential segments fared better than others with the 8-10kW and 10-15kW ranges posting some growth but not enough to make up for a 25% contraction in the 6-8kW volume.

“The market recovered in the second half of the year, off the back of electricity price rises that regularly made front-page news. It took some time for that to flow through to installation volumes, partly due to all of the rain on the east coast. Installation volumes leapt skywards when the weather cleared, with November and December becoming two of Australia’s five biggest months on record,” the report reads.

Additionally, 5.3GW of PV capacity in total was installed in 2022, which lifted the total installed capacity in the country by 20%.

Solar farms had a record year for new capacity being brought online which was driven by three super-large solar farms that exceeded 200MWac in size.

“The record year for solar farms offset the contraction in rooftop PV, meaning 2022 wound up with the market being practically steady – though the 2% increase in total deployment still enables the industry to claim 2022 as a record year,” Warwick writes.

“2023 brings the all-time tally to 31.4GW, of which 21.7GW is rooftop (19.9GW is sub-100kW).”

The full report is available for purchase here.