Australian homes and businesses installed a total of 157MW of residential and commercial solar in the month of April, marking a drop in volume from March, thanks mainly to the Easter and Anzac Day public holidays.
The “April dip” saw volumes fall in every state and across all solar size classes, according to the latest monthly tally from SunWiz, except in the smaller commercial ranges of 20-30kW, and 50-75kW.
Nevertheless, the total volume of solar installed for the year to date is still tracking well ahead of the same time last year – at 45 per cent higher.
“Commercial is on the wane, as a proportion of STC volume, across most states, NSW being the exception,” said SunWiz managing director Warwick Johnston.
Johnston said all eyes would now be on the Victorian residential market, watching for any impact from the pause in the state government’s Solar Homes rebate, which will kick back in in July.
We had an extra 3kW put up end February. Unfortunately Powercor can’t keep the mains voltage low enough to allow the inverter to be very productive. It works on cloudy days and really hot days when there is a high usage to air conditioners. On sunny days with little usage it is useless. I have informed them and they have checked and accepted that the mains voltage is too high and have referred it to their engineers but either they are slow or can’t do anything about it. It defeats the purpose to install solar panels if they are not allowed to generate power.
We’re just 5 months into the new year and our installations are already 45% higher than last year! percentage will surely increase by year end. Stumbled across an interesting read here: http://ironnyray.com/blog/decentralized-power-source-power-for-the-future/