Solar Down Under: Australian Solar Visit

From an inspiring visit to India with 70% solar growth and an ambitious 10m rooftop program, to a week in Australia - another solar star country! 

We’re seeing huge growth in battery adoption to add to the 35% solar penetration. Aussie pros have installed 2GWh of distributed battery installs in just the first 4 months of the new battery initiative! The market feels a little scarily hot right now so watch out everyone (I’d prefer a market-driven policy to de-risk this) but the vision of adding a mass of distributed batteries is amazing, and will allow Australia to show the world how to do it at high penetration (lets see if Adelaide wins the next COP to help that messaging). 

Interestingly, Australia can still go much further with rooftop. Government research shows an estimated capacity of 179GW potential across all Aussie homes and commercial roof space. That could supply over 100% of Australia’s electricity (when combined with all those batteries!) We did similar analysis with Google imagery and found the UK could also generate over 100% of its TWh needs with rooftop solar…

So at both ends of sunny and cloudy climes, rooftop can do it all if we design the energy system openly and fairly - with masses of batteries to shift the load and deliver a resilient grid for all.

Great as always to meet up with the amazing OpenSolar team at HQ, who support over half of Aussie pros, and to catch up with some of our amazing partners on this quick trip. Next stop on this global tour is COP30 to work with the Global Solar Council and press the cause for a huge global push to ensure solar has access to the grid, to remove trade barriers and to enable low-cost solar and storage at scale!

Jet lag is not my friend but inspiring to meet so many solar warriors around the world! 

Go the s-curve!!