SolarCity Accounts For ⅓ Of US Residential Rooftop Installations In 2015

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Originally published on Solar Love.

2015 has been a good year for SolarCity after tallying over one-third of all residential rooftop installations in this country.

The five leading US installers accounted for more than half of all residential solar installations between Q1 and Q3 of this year. But SolarCity has claimed the lion’s share of this market pie, reporting 34% of residential solar PV installations in the first three-quarters of 2015, according to GTM Research’s “US PV Leaderboard: Q4 2015.”

The market share of the leading US residential solar installers in this period are listed as follows:

1. SolarCity 34.1%
2. Vivint Solar 11.6%
3. Sunrun 2.6%
4. NRG Home Solar 2%
5. Sungevity 1.9%

GTM Research also reports this is the third year the US residential market has seen more than 50% growth. This encouraging data provides sound news for the solar energy industry and for renewable energy overall.

The research report concluded, “This rapid growth can largely be attributed to the widespread availability and increasing diversity of financing solutions.” Lower pricing should also be counted as a contributor to this growth picture.

The residential market is also expected to profit from the extension of the ITC tax credit for solar beyond 2022, with the current 30% level remaining until 2019. The ITC had been scheduled to close at the end of 2016 for residential systems with larger projects dropping from the current 30% level to 10%.

GTM Research expects the competitive landscape for this industry will continue evolving, pointing to new market entrants, acquisitions, and changing consumer finance options.

The US Department of Energy has reported,

“Since President Obama took office, the number of homes with rooftop solar has grown from more than 66,000 to 734,000. Last year, the solar industry added jobs 10 times faster than the rest of the economy and solar represented 40 percent of all new electric generating capacity brought online in the first half of 2015. Since the beginning of 2010, the average cost of a solar electric system has dropped by 50 percent. In fact, distributed solar prices fell 10 to 20 percent in 2014 alone. And since President Obama took office, solar power has increased twenty fold.”

We look forward to charting similar growth data for residential rooftop solar in the coming year.

Images: Solar workers installing solar panels via Shutterstock; chart via GTM Research

Reprinted with permission.