According to GTM’s quarterly solar market report, the residential solar market is expected to drop 13 percent for 2017. In 2016, the market saw a 19 percent rise, and four straight years before that of increases above 50 percent.
An analysis of installation data suggests that SolarCity, a leading company in residential solar, owned by Tesla, Inc. is helping drive down the market. Tesla Inc. acquired SolarCity in 2016. Reuters reports that Tesla’s rooftop solar installations have fallen sharply each quarter in 2017 compared with 2016. In the third quarter, installations were off by 42 percent over the previous year.
SolarCity accounted for a quarter of the national market in 2016. By the third quarter of this year, its share had dropped to 14 percent, according to GTM’s U.S. PV Leaderboard report. “If SolarCity accounted for a 30 percent share of the national market and you cut those installation volumes effectively in half, that’s really what we are looking at in terms of the market downturn in 2017,” said Austin Perea, who tracks the U.S. residential solar market for GTM.
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