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manual_tranny OP t1_j1em4l7 wrote

New estimates for the world's total solar power installations in 2022 range from 230-300 GW, blowing the doors off projections made late last year.

Manufacturing capacity has exploded in the past year and is expected to continue rapidly scaling-up through 2023. Factories could produce as much as 500 GW of solar modules next year. For perspective, it is estimated that the world's total solar capacity reached 1000 GW only 9 months ago, in March of 2022

The article briefly interviews Jenny Chase of BloombergNEF:

pv magazine USA: What most surprised analysts about 2022? Where did we go wrong?

Honestly, China was the biggest upset as usual, and we’re not even totally sure the final number will be our 126GW(DC) current estimate (our estimate was below 100GW for most of the year). However, the modules have got to be going somewhere in Q4. Also Europe has bought over 70 GW of modules from China, though we do not believe it has installed much more than 42GW yet.

Recently, you mentioned that projections beyond 300 GW to 400 GW a year before the end of the decade are tough to make, because even if we can manufacture such a large quantity – where are the national programs and power grids to connect it to?

Honestly, I just can’t bully the local analysts for the individual markets which haven’t already got a lot of solar into forecasting transformative growth. You need new markets to hit 1 TW/year, but progress has been slow – not nonexistent, but slow – in places like Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and parts of southeast Asia (but not Vietnam). There aren’t national programs in these places (at least not ones I trust to do anything, looking at you Saudi Arabia) and often the solar will need to support the grid rather than just connecting to it.

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