Australia Out-Installed Germany in Under-10kW Solar in 2011

May 30th, 2012 by Zachary Shahan

Reportedly, “Australia installed more solar power in the under-10 kW system size than Germany did in 2011.” This is rather surprising. Everyone knows German solar power, especially rooftop solar, expanded greatly in 2011. But who’s talking about Australia?

Of course, Australia’s total 837 MW of newly installed solar in 2011 doesn’t compare with Germany’s 7,481 MW. Apparently, Australia hasn’t offered much support for utility-scale solar yet, but small-scale solar is in high demand. 815 MW of Australia’s PV installations were less than 100 kW in size and 96% of these — 804 MW — were from solar systems smaller than 10 kW in size. This barely beats Germany’s 759 MW. Similarly, in 2010, Australia beat Germany in the number of installations at this size, but not quite in MW installed.

“On the strength of its residential sector, Australia ranked 8th in capacity installed in 2010, and ranked 7th in 2011, highly respectable for a nation of its size,” Warwick Johnston of Australia writes on Renewable Energy World. “These figures mean Australia could easily be the world’s largest market for residential PV.”

While Australia lags on commercial- and utility-scale solar, its residential-scale solar success has led it to some important cost reductions and “socket parity” about as fast as anyone.

“As Bloomberg New Energy Finance showed, Australia is one of the first countries to have reached residential ‘socket parity'; ahead of much of the world. Australia has also showed that in spite of massive cuts to government support, residential solar can survive without premium feed-in tariffs when solar power is primarily used on-site. With ‘socket parity’ reached for small businesses, and tantalisingly close for large business, Australia’s commercial market is set to grow organically, free from the distortions of solar-specific government incentives.”

Exciting stuff. Goes to show you, even just promoting residential solar power adoption can quickly drive down costs and make solar power cost competitive in an unfair market where the health and environmental externalities of fossil fuels still aren’t taken into account.

My guess is that getting solar on a lot of residential roofs will also increase political support for solar, in general….

Image: Brendan Howard / Shutterstock.com

Keep up to date with all the hottest cleantech news by subscribing to our (free) cleantech newsletter, or keep an eye on sector-specific news by getting our (also free) solar energy newsletter, electric vehicle newsletter, or wind energy newsletter.

Tags: Australia, australia solar energy, Germany, germany solar energy

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

http://yrihf.com John Bailo

No…no…zis cannot be true…

What are you telling me…that Chermany has been exzeeded by a nation of…of….KAN-GER-ROOS!!!
- http://ronaldbrak.blogspot.com.au/ Ronald Brak
  
  Too right mate! An if ya don’t like it, you and me can play a little game of catch with a large burrowing marsupial. That’s right, I’m challenging you to hand to hand wombat.
  - http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
    
    this thread has me lost
Mr T

The reason for this was the soon to end solar rebates. In short, everyone who had been thinking of installing solar was spurred on to doing so. The number of applications for rebated systems went through the roof as the deadline approached. Now that the rebates are pretty much gone and the feed-in tarrif multiplier has been steadily reduced, it will be interesting to see the figures for 2012 and 2013, given also that ther has been a massive drop in PV prices.

Sadly, as the article explains, there was almost no large scale solar installed here last year. In fact, the largest solar installation in the country is yet to be completed and will be a measley 10MW. This is due to the lack of government support for large scale renewables here, as well as the artificially low cost of coal fired electricity due to the 10 of billions of dollars of tax breaks and incentives the fossil fuel industry gets here every year.

We still have a long way to go…
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  the coming carbon pricing system to change that big-govt lethargy much, you think?
Ross

Howzat? – To use a cricketing metaphor for our solar doubting antipodean cousins.