Feasibility Concern|Solar PV Capacity

Why this criterion? This criterion flags scenarios that assume a deployment of solar photovoltaics capacity that is inconsistent with near-term market outlooks.

This technology is available at scale and has short project lead times, meaning that there are no fundamental obstacles to fast deployment. Its near-term growth can be estimated based on today's installed capacity and near-term market outlooks. While these estimates have their limitations, they can be used to set broad ranges of near-term feasibility.

Why this threshold? Existing capacities in 2024 are reported by IRENA (2025). Yearly additions for 2025–2030 are estimated in a market outlook by BNEF (2024).

The market outlook data comprises 8 regional categories and a "buffer/unknown" category.

Based on the existing capacity data and the market outlook, we assume the following global thresholds for 2030:
• Lower threshold, high concern: 10% less than capacities operational in 2024, plus 33.75% of 2025–2030 additions from the market outlook (without buffer/unknown).
• Lower threshold, medium concern: 5% less than capacities operational in 2024, plus 71.25% of 2025–2030 additions from the market outlook (without buffer/unknown).
• Upper threshold, medium concern: 5% more than capacities operational in 2024, plus 157.5% of 2025–2030 additions from the market outlook (without buffer/unknown).
• Upper threshold, high concern: 10% more than capacities operational in 2024, plus 220.0% of 2025–2030 additions from the market outlook (with buffer/unknown).

Moreover, we assume the following regional thresholds for 2030:
• Lower threshold, medium concern: 40% less than capacities operational in 2024 plus 22.5% of 2025–2030 additions from the market outlook (without buffer/unknown).
• Upper threshold, medium concern: 40% more than capacities operational in 2024 plus 280% of 2025–2030 additions from the market outlook (without buffer/unknown).

WorldGeneric regionsModel-native regions

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Note

Due to reporting inconsistencies in legacy projects, several models reported capacity-values that were far below actual power generation from solar PV, causing an overly restrictive application of this criterion.

To remedy this inconsistency, we implemented an exception in the evaluation workflow for Release v1.0 and v1.1 of the SCI ensemble: any high concern flag was changed to medium if actual power generation from solar PV was above 10.5 EJ/yr in 2030, corresponding to the lowest generation value of scenarios that meet the lower bound of the capacity threshold.

Visit https://github.com/IAMconsortium/scenariocompass/tree/main/scripts/sci_v1.0 for more information.

Reference data

Dataset	Source	Description
`IRENA-RCS-2025-BNEF-2024-high-proj`	IRENA (2025)	Custom projections based on IRENA (2025) and {{ source2 }} with details documented in the description of the `Feasibility Concern\|Solar PV Capacity` and `Feasibility Concern\|Wind Capacity` criteria.
`IRENA-RCS-2025-BNEF-2024-low-proj`	IRENA (2025)	Custom projections based on IRENA (2025) and {{ source2 }} with details documented in the description of the `Feasibility Concern\|Solar PV Capacity` and `Feasibility Concern\|Wind Capacity` criteria.

Sources

Identifier	Bibliographic information	Links
`BNEF-2024`	BNEF. 3Q 2024 Global PV Market Outlook. Bloomberg Finance L.P., New York, NY, USA, 2024.	URL
`IRENA-RCS-2025`	IRENA. Renewable Capacity Statistics 2025. International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, March 2025. ISBN 978-92-9260-652-7.	URL