PV data consultancy Wiki-Solar says the world’s top solar developers have added nearly 50 GW of new solar capacity since early 2023, raising their cumulative capacity to 146.7 GW – more than one-fifth of the global total.
Wiki-Solar’s latest league table finds the cumulative installations of the top 34 engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractors now globally stands in excess of 100 GW (AC).
With utility scale solar installations accelerating, Philip Wolfe, founder of PV data consultancy Wiki-Solar, drills into the data to highlight some interesting variations in relative progress around the world.
Wiki-Solar’s latest league table of utility-scale solar project developers shows that only six renewable specialists occupy the top 20 spots.
The 1.36 GW of solar capacity installed by Shanghai Electric across just three projects in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 helped it enter an annual ranking of the global solar industry’s biggest engineering, procurement, and construction contractors.
In his second article, Philip Wolfe founder of Wiki-Solar lists the world’s largest individual solar PV power plants. The biggest solar parks and other clusters of plants will be listed in subsequent blogs.
Solar energy pioneer and founder of Wiki-Solar, Philip Wolfe updates his series of blogs on the world’s largest solar power stations, first published in pv magazine in 2019. At that time, there were no single solar power plants over 1 GWAC. The record now is 2.2 GWAC.
A global ranking of large scale solar project capacities indicates prominent roles for a resurgent Spain, behind the usual top three of China, the U.S. and India, with Australia and the Netherlands also on the rise. There were disappointing returns, though, for the U.K., Italy and Canada.
The Italian energy company has developed four big solar plants in the last 21 months to add 794 MW of generation capacity to its 3.67 GW solar portfolio and is emblematic of companies from the wider energy sector focusing on the renewable technology.
Although the Wiki-Solar website ranking only provides a snapshot of PV project engineering, procurement and construction contracts outside of China, it is nevertheless a useful indicator of the changing global solar market landscape. Of the top 11 companies, three are based in India, three in the United States, another three in Spain and two in the United States.