SEIA says 14% of US solar capacity is corporate solar

Corporate solar is growing fast in the US and now accounts for 14% of the country’s installed solar capacity, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) said on Tuesday as it released its Solar Means Business 2022 report.

US companies have deployed almost 19 GW of on-site and off-site solar installations through June 2022, up from the 9.4 GW built through 2019. A driver of recent growth is off-site corporate solar procurement which already accounts for 55% of total commercial solar use.

“About half of all corporate solar has been installed in the last two and half years,” noted SEIA president and chief executive Abigail Ross Hopper. “From data centres to industrial freezers, the most energy-intensive business operations are turning to solar as the most reliable and affordable way to power their infrastructure,” she commented further.

The list of the top corporate solar users is dominated by tech and retail giants. Meta (NASDAQ:FB) is the leader with an installed solar capacity of 3,588 MW, an increase from 177 MW in early 2019. It is followed by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) with 1,113 MW of capacity, Apple (NASDAQ:AMZN) with 987 MW, Walmart (NYSE:WMT) with 689 MW and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) with 550 MW.

Next in the list are Target, which has 515 MW and remains the top onsite corporate solar user, Cargill, Kaiser Permanente, AB Inbev and Evraz North America.

Commercial solar capacity is seen to double again over the next three years, SEIA said. Almost 27 GW of off-site corporate solar projects are due to go live by 2025, which is nearly a third of the total contracted solar pipeline, it added.

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