On December 7, the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) and consulting agency WoodMackenzie released the "2023Q4 U.S. Solar Market Insights" report, saying that with the federal clean energy policy coming into effect, the new photovoltaic installed capacity in the United States in the third quarter of 2023 reached 6.5 GW, a year-on-year increase of 35%, and also became a new quarterly high in the history of the United States, and in the first three quarters of 2023, the cumulative installed photovoltaic capacity in the United States reached 161GW, more than 1/3 of all installed power generation capacity.
According to the report, most of the new installations in the third quarter of this year came from the utility-scale segment, like ground on grid solar system, agrivoltaic system, pv energy storage, which increased by 58% year-on-year, in addition, the residential PV sector increased by 12% year-on-year, as detailed below:
Residential PV: In the third quarter of 2023, residential PV installations in more than 210,000 projects hit a quarterly high of 1.8GW, up 12% year-on-year and 29% quarter-on-quarter. What's more, the sequential growth is built on a 31% year-over-year increase in Q2, with California being the largest contributor, most notably due to the implementation deadline for changes to California's net metering policy.
PV Ground Mounting Systems plants: Rising financing costs, inverter shortages, and interconnection bottlenecks impacted the utility-scale PV segment, where new contract signings were at their lowest level since 2018. However, with the improvement of the global PV module supply chain, 4GW of new PV capacity will be added to the utility-scale segment in Q3 2023, a year-on-year increase of 58%, which is also equivalent to the new increase in the whole of 2022, and the utility-scale PV installed capacity reached a record 12GW in the first nine months.
C&I and community PV: Q3 C&I PV installed capacity was 363MW, down 3% year-on-year and 6% QoQ. Primarily a slight slowdown in the Northeast states, partially offset by growth in California and emerging states. Community PV capacity was 274MW, up 14% year-on-year and flat compared to the previous quarter. Looking ahead, SEIA and WoodMackenzie forecast that the cumulative installed capacity of solar PV will increase to 37GW by 2028, up from 161GW at the end of September 2023.
