Historical Vetting|Solar PV Capacity
Why this criterion? This criterion flags scenarios that reports deployment of solar photovoltaics capacity that is inconsistent historical values.
This is a concern because the underlying modelling likely makes false assumptions on the mitigation effort required to reach net-zero emissions.
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 2025:
• Lower threshold, failed vetting: 10% less than capacities operational in 2024, plus 33.75% of 2025 additions from the market outlook (without buffer/unknown).
• Upper threshold, failed vetting: 10% more than capacities operational in 2024, plus 220.0% of 2025 additions from the market outlook (with buffer/unknown).
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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.
Sources
| Identifier | Bibliographic information | Links |
|---|---|---|
|
BNEF. 3Q 2024 Global PV Market Outlook. Bloomberg Finance L.P., New York, NY, USA, 2024. | URL |
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IRENA. Renewable Capacity Statistics 2025. International Renewable Energy Agency, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, March 2025. ISBN 978-92-9260-652-7. | URL |