In the first quarter of 2024, the U.S. solar industry installed 11.8 GW of new solar capacity, bringing the country’s total to 200 GW. This is according to the latest “U.S. Solar Market Insight” report from SEIA and Wood Mackenzie.
The report also publishes the final numbers for 2023 — the country added over 40 GW of new solar capacity last year. Wood Mackenzie expects that the U.S. solar industry will install another 40 GW in 2024.
Massive growth in the utility-scale market is driving record solar deployment figures as the segment added nearly 10 GW of new capacity in Q1. Florida and Texas saw strong utility-scale growth and led all states for new solar capacity in Q1. Other markets like New Mexico and Ohio also had strong quarters, installing 686 and 546 MW, respectively.
“The U.S. solar industry continues to show strength in terms of deployments,” said Michelle Davis, head of global solar at Wood Mackenzie and lead author of the report. “At the same time, the solar industry faces a number of challenges to its continued growth including availability of labor, high voltage equipment constraints, and continued trade policy uncertainty.”
The residential solar segment is feeling the full weight of policy changes in California and experienced its worst quarter in two years, installing just 1.3 GW — a 25% decline year-over-year and 18% quarter-over-quarter. The commercial (434 MW) and community solar (279 MW) markets remained steady year-over-year.
“The residential solar segment is feeling the full weight of policy changes in California and experienced its worst quarter in two years, installing just 1.3 GW — a 25% decline year-over-year and 18% quarter-over-quarter. The commercial (434 MW) and community solar (279 MW) markets remained steady year-over-year.”
Interesting statistic, what one seems to forget and fails to apply to the latest/greatest statics is in the case of the 1.3GW ‘only’ doesn’t show the actual efficiency of residential or local distributed energy generation and use systems. Of that statistical 1.3GW reported, if all or most of this was on house or local, the savings in energy costs and grid draw can be substantially decreased. Considering a home roof array with just 4 sun hours and up to perhaps 8 sun hours a day, when looking at intrinsic transformer step losses along the grid, one is effectively saving around 217MWh to 433MWh of grid loss energy each day. What’s the CO2 load on avoiding this offset due to efficiency? In California if one can find and parse the statistics from say 2000 to 2024 how much residential, small business and commercial facilities have their own solar PV arrays? Some solar PV publications are writing that California is producing about 49,500GW a day. Just sayin’, this is a marathon, not a sprint.