Brazilian solar PV energy association ABSOLAR announced on January 22, 2020 that the Latin American country's cumulative operational distributed solar PV generation capacity has reached 2 GW. The association announced this on its LinkedIn profile stating that this capacity comes from 171,900 grid-connected solar PV systems.
"This shows that more and more homes, trades, industries, rural producers, public buildings and small land are betting on the benefits of clean and renewable microgeneration and minigeneration systems from the sun. The Brazilian potential is gigantic!," said ABSOLAR in its announcement.
Brazil crossed the 1 GW capacity level in this domain in June 2019, according to the statistics shared by its National Electric Energy Agency (ANEEL) (see Brazil's Distributed Generation Capacity Exceeds 1 GW).
A note released by ABSOLAR, and reported by various media, claims that solar PV accounts for practically all of the distributed generation (DG) capacity in the country, to be precise 99.8% of all installed. It also represents over BRL 10 billion ($2.39 billion) in investments since 2012 across five national regions.
The biggest stakeholder in Brazil's distributed solar power generation systems is the residential segment that claims a 72.6% market share followed by commercial and services segment with 17.99%, rural consumers 6.25%, industries 2.68%, public authorities 0.43% while the remaining 0.04% and 0.01% has been installed by services and public lighting segments, respectively.
Among Brazilian states with the largest share of this capacity, Minas Gerais claims the top spot, followed by Rio Grande do Sul, São Paulo and Paraná, Mato Grosso and Santa Catarina, in that order, reported Brazilian newspaper Diario do Nordeste.
Comparing the Brazilian distributed solar PV market to those of Australia, the US, China and Japan that have exceeded 2 million system installations already, ABSOLAR CEO Rodrigo Sauaia celebrated the fact that the national government realizes the strategic importance of PV for the sustainable development of the country. However, he said that they need to do more quickly through a stable and fair legal framework to bring out its true potential.
ABSOLAR does not mention how much solar DG capacity was installed in 2019. TaiyangNews contacted ABSOLAR President Ronaldo Koloszuk but till the time of this news being published, we had not heard back. So if we do the calculation from 1 GW in June 2019, it should mean Brazil added 1 GW more within six months. SolarPower Europe in its May 2019 Global Market Outlook (GMO) report forecast the total installed capacity of Brazil by the end of 2019 should reach around 3.3 GW (see SolarPower Europe: 800 GW New PV By 2023).
Recently, ANEEL announced 551 MW of large scale solar power capacity additions in 2019 (see Brazil Added 551 MW Large Scale Solar In 2019).