Customer-sited solar is a significant opportunity, which will materialize in the coming decades and bring change to energy markets and power network operations. There has been significant debate about how best to structure incentives and regulations around customer-sited solar – and more recently solar-plus-storage – and the considerations are complex. Policy makers must aim to stimulate development that realizes the benefits of these technologies, while avoiding the potential adverse effects of large-scale uncoordinated development.
There have been limited studies at a global level to examine the impact of different policies on
A huge potential exists for more distributed generation on buildings and facility rooftops.
Studies vary in assumptions and scope, but all confirm the potential is considerable. More
than half of rooftops in the U.S. or Germany could host solar, and this ratio goes up to twothirds in the U.K. and up to 80% in Australia.
BloombergNEF’s modelling projects a total installed base of 2.2TW customer-sited solar by 2050. In this scenario, by 2050, 167 million households and 23 million businesses ‘go solar’ globally, representing an eight-fold increase from the 0.27TW installed by end-2020 (Figure 4). Provided roadblocks to development are removed, as described in this report, the long-term projection could in fact be larger.
Source: “Realizing the Potential of Customer Sited Solar”, BloombergNEF