Don’t believe the hype from the increasingly desperate renewables industry: solar power has crashed and burned.

Goldman Sachs is predicting a 24 percent drop in solar installations this year. By any measure, that constitutes a major industry slump.

According to Bloomberg:

The pace of global installations will contract by 24 percent in 2018, Goldman analysts led by Brian Lee said in a research note late Wednesday. That’s far more dire than the 3 percent decline forecast by Bloomberg NEF in the bleakest of three scenarios outlined in a report earlier this month. Credit Suisse Group AG is forecasting a 17 percent contraction.

The anticipated slowdown would mark the first time the solar market has shrunk. It comes after China announced in late May it was curbing utility-scale development in the world’s biggest market, pulling the plug on about 20 gigawatts of projects. That will reduce global installations to 75 gigawatts, down from 99 gigawatts in 2017, Lee said in an email.

 “Lowering our coverage view to cautious, we believe oversupply is set to continue in the near to-medium term as demand from the largest solar markets remains tepid,” Lee wrote in the research note.
 As I have written before the renewables industry is a gigantic chimera – a huge bubble just waiting to burst the moment that the subsidies dry up.
In the Obama it did just fine – as an industry does when there’s a green ideologue in the Oval Office happy to reward his campaign benefactors by bunging $500 million of taxpayers money into a doomed enterprise like Solyndra.
That era is now over. There’s a new guy in the White House setting the energy and environmental agenda. He is not a fan of green boondoggles.
Short solar; short wind. You might just make enough to cover your energy bills.