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| Wed, 3rd Jun 2020 17:04:00 |
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Covid-19 weekly round-up: It is still unclear how the crisis will play out on various solar segments, although one US installer says business has never been better… |
Module price falls driven by the energy demand slump and Chinese oversupply may reverse at the end of the year, Germany appears immune to the Covid rooftop curse and emergency funding has been offered up to EU businesses affected by the crisis.
Although analyst Wood Mackenzie and industry body the U.S. Energy Storage Association have reported positive first-quarter figures – and expect year-on-year growth from 2020 – industry insiders have warned the Covid-19 crisis, which started to affect the industry at the end of March, will "more seriously affect Q2."
In an opinion piece for pv magazine India, Amplus Solar's Naveen Arora said the demand slump driven by Covid-19 shutdowns, combined with Chinese oversupply, has caused solar module prices to fall 6-8% since February with a further 3-3.5% reduction possible into the next quarter. However, she cautioned, Chinese end-of-year demand and the project extensions permitted Indian developers affected by the public health crisis could again change the supply and demand equilibrium in the final three months of the year, possibly leading module prices to recover.
It is unclear what effect the Covid-19 crisis in having on the Australian rooftop PV market. Data gathered from the small scale technology certificates (STCs) issued as part of incentives programs indicated a healthy 222 MW of rooftop PV was added last month, a figure 23% higher than that seen in May last year. However, it also marked a second consecutive monthly fall and, with industry surveys indicating installers are seeing new business leads dry up, there are fears the big time lag between signing up for household solar and having STCs issued could mean the true effects of the crisis will not become obvious until further down the line.
No such concerns were voiced by Germany's Bundesnetzagentur, which has reported 380 MW of new solar was added in the country in April. That figure included 318 MW of feed-in-tariff-backed small scale systems as Covid-19 continued to fail to dent the nation's rooftop market.
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