Total U.S. PV installations in the first quarter of 2022 fell 52% compared
According to the U.S. Photovoltaic Market Insights report jointly released by research firm Wood Mackenzie and the American Photovoltaic Industry Association, the installed capacity of photovoltaic systems in the United States in the first quarter of 2022 was 3.9GW, a decrease of 52% compared with the fourth quarter of 2021. . The report claims that the first quarter of 2022 was the weakest quarter for the U.S. PV industry in two years.
The installed capacity of residential PV systems installed in the first quarter of 2022 continued to grow, increasing by 5% compared to the fourth quarter of 2021. Compared to the end of last year, the installed capacity of community PV systems in the U.S. fell by 59% in the first quarter of 2022, and utility-scale PV systems dropped by 64%.
The planned deployment of utility-scalephotovoltaic systemshas been hit hard by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s investigation into the Southeast Asian country for allegedly evading tariffs, according to Wood Mackenzie. However, an analyst at the company noted that the downward trend in the first quarter of the year began before the survey was announced, suggesting the impact of broader supply chain constraints.
According to research by Wood Mackenzie, supply chain disruptions triggered by the US Department of Commerce’s anti-circumvention investigation appear to have had a significant impact on the planned pipeline of PV projects, suggesting that other The challenges are also increasing.
According to the U.S. PV Market Insights quarterly report, the deployment of utility-scale PV projects with a total installed capacity of about 17.6GW has been delayed by at least a year, and the deployment of 450MW of utility-scale PV projects has been cancelled entirely. Procurement of utility-scale PV systems has reached its lowest level since 2017. As a result, Wood Mackenzie has halved its forecast for installed PV system capacity in the United States in 2022.
However, Michelle Davis, chief PV analyst at Wood Mackenzie and lead author of the report, said the downward trend began before the Commerce Department announced its investigation. The survey, which was not launched until the end of the first quarter of this year, suggests that some of the decline in PV deployment has been affected by supply chain constraints at least over the past few quarters, she said.
While Davis expects the process of installing PV systems in the U.S. to slow for much of the 2022 letter, she said it is difficult to predict the U.S. PV market given the ongoing investigation and the Biden administration’s announcement of a two-year delay in implementing PV tariffs What will be the performance. She noted that the U.S. federal government’s two-year moratorium on tariffs could add 2 to 3 GW of installed PV systems this year, but Wood Mackenzie analysts have taken a cut from their forecast for PV deployments. 6GW.
Davis said that while the two-year delay in the introduction of tariffs would bring some benefits, it would be limited to a certain extent because policy uncertainty, idle factories and corporate layoffs have already done a lot of damage to the photovoltaic industry.
She expects that in the next few quarters, only those PV projects that have already procured PV modules will be installed in the US. And some developers who have not yet secured the supply of PV modules may delay deployment. She predicts that such massive delays will continue until 2023.