Originally published on Sustainnovate.
GTM Research has released an interesting new statistics regarding solar power in the United States… Ah, yes, you’ve already noticed it in the title above. As it says, a solar PV system is indeed installed in the USA every 2½ minutes, on average.
Putting this into a bit of context, Stephen Lacey notes that “Ten years ago, a system was going up every two hours on average.”
That’s also up from every 4 minutes in 2013, a statistic that even President Obama has mentioned (in 2014’s State of the Union address). Of course, the most systems were installed on homes. Approximately 200,000 solar PV systems were installed in the residential market. It wasn’t stated how many were installed in other sectors of the solar market, but the straight math just leaves about ~10,000 more. Again, that’s not at all surprising, and it’s really the residential solar number that interests most of us.
The 2014 residential solar PV total was four times greater than the ~50,000 that were installed in 2011, but it is expected to be much lower than the number installed in 2015 and 2016. If the rate of growth keeps up (and there’s a lot of expectation it will), 2015 will see ~900,000 cumulative solar PV installations.
Next year, Lacey notes, we may well be up to 1 new solar PV system every minute. Imagine that!
Of course, there are a lot of reasons behind solar power’s growth — 11 by my count. If you haven’t gone solar yet, maybe now’s the time?
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