Hail taking a greater toll on solar insurance market, finds kWh study

By Chris Munro

June 16 - (The Insurer) - Hail is taking a greater toll on the solar energy insurance market and now accounts for most of the sector’s total losses even though the peril represents just 6% of claim incidents, data from kWh Analytics shows.

In its newly published Solar Risk Assessment 2025 report, renewable energy-focused MGA kWh noted that hail damage has emerged as a significant peril impacting solar installations, representing 73% of the sector's annual financial losses, up 8% from previous years.

“While hail events may be relatively rare, their financial impact is disproportionately severe when they do occur,” said Reilly Fagan, senior data analyst at kWh.

Looking more broadly at the solar market, kWh’s data shows that 23% of solar installation sites have suffered at least one partial loss, including both attritional and catastrophic claims.

Among those that have faced losses, kWh said 29% have suffered multiple loss events.

As Dr John Allen, associate professor, and Dr Subhadarsini Das, postdoctoral research fellow at Central Michigan University (CMU) highlighted in kWh’s new report, large hail has become a source of increasing concern for utility scale solar photovoltaic (PV) plants.

However, to date, the market’s ability to estimate how widespread the threat posed by hail is has been limited.

Using a new model, Das and Allen 2025, NPJ Natural Hazards, the CMU staffers found that there is a 10% change of a potentially damaging event, whereby hail measures two inches or more in diameter, occurring each year.

They noted that the statistic applies to areas larger than the typical utility-scale PV asset. But the findings also made clear that hail mitigation through stowing or module hardening should be a key part of the plans for PV resilience going forward.

“Damaging hail is occurring regularly in the nearby vicinity of many PV sites across the country, and so to ignore hail is rolling the dice,” the Dr Allen and Dr Das said in the report.