Sales of PV monitoring equipment surpassed global PV installations in 2013, according to analysis by GTM Research.
According to a report by the market research firm, the market for PV monitoring systems hit 39.7GW last year, compared to 37GW of new PV installed around the world last year.
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Overall the market grew by over 90% from the 20.5GW installed in 2012.
According to the report, ‘Global PV Monitoring: Technologies, Markets and Leading Players 2014-2018’, the market was driven by new US and Asian installations, as well as retrofits to existing power plants in Europe.
“The amount of new monitoring solutions retrofitted to older plants in 2013 totalled over 6.3GW, or approximately 15% of the monitoring business,” said a GTM spokesman.
“This allowed several European countries to remain attractive markets for monitoring providers despite the downturn in new PV installation, as in Germany, Italy or Eastern Europe. And surprisingly the US market accounted for almost 30% of global monitoring retrofits, adding almost two gigawatts of monitoring systems beyond those deployed in new power plants.”
The report said the PV monitoring vendor landscape was “highly competitive”, with the top 38 vendors in the market having at least 500MW monitored each or adding 100MW in 2013, while the 70 providers analysed in the report account for a combined aggregate fleet exceeding 79GW.
