Global solar PV installations to grow to ~600 Gigawatts this year

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica via email. Or follow us on Google News!

Solar is constantly breaking records. More solar is being installed than any other source of electricity in the United States and several other markets, and the world as a whole. We thought solar was going to be booming for a couple of years, but last year it went through the roof, and this year — it’s going to go way above the roof.

A new forecast from BloombergNEF (BNEF) shows that total solar PV installations will reach nearly 600 gigawatts (GW) this year — 592 GW is their target. That’s a 33% increase from the 2023 total!

The bulk of that growth in solar should come from China, and there is no one even close to that level. Europe is second, but it is a small part of the Chinese total.

The only negative here is that the very low prices for solar panels are putting a lot of pressure on solar panel companies. “Polysilicon prices have fallen to $4.7/kg. That is below the cost of production for almost all manufacturers,” BNEF writes. “Companies are shutting down factories for maintenance, and we have lowered our estimate for polysilicon production in 2024 to 1.96 million metric tons – still enough to make 900 GW of modules.”

Furthermore: “Module prices have fallen to $0.096 per watt, the lowest level ever, while polysilicon is below production costs at $4.7 per kilogram. Most solar manufacturers are expected to report losses this year, their convertible bonds are showing signs of weakness and some will not survive this cycle.”

“The module price reduction was discussed earlier this year by the chairman of two of China’s largest PV manufacturers, Trina Solar and JinkoSolar,” pv technology notes. “Last May they stressed that module prices were nearing bottom, while future demand should allow the industry to reach a turning point.”

The forecast in this report, the Global PV Market Outlook for Q3 2024is up slightly from the previous quarterly report. BNEF notes that developments in India and Pakistan led to the increased forecast, while slower than expected installations in Japan and South Africa counteracted that trend. The net effect was a 1% increase in the full year 2024 forecast.

Here are a few more key statistics:

• 1.2 terawatts of the annual production capacity of solar panels worldwide.
• 0.9 terawatts —how much solar module capacity can actually be built with the expected global supply of polysilicon in 2024.
• 0.6 terawatts — estimated total installation capacity of solar PV this year.

In early 2024, BNEF predicted that total solar PV installations for 2024 would be somewhere between 520 GW and 655 GW. So 592 GW is right between those low and high estimates and therefore in line with what BNEF expected.

If you want more details on BNEF’s solar PV industry figures, analysis and forecasts, the full report is available to BNEF clients here . For the rest of us, this is a good overview of the global solar PV market, and I think we can all be very happy with the growth of the solar PV market and the sheer volume of solar PV expected to be manufactured and installed through 2024.