Featured in European Solar's new dawn – 06-2021

China struggles with solar supply

Since July 2020, the PV industry has been experiencing price rises, which have affected almost all the components in a solar system. As these price increases spill out into higher installation costs, we see end user prices for solar rising for the first time in 10 years, threatening the competitiveness of PV in certain markets. Vincent Shaw reports from Shanghai on solar manufacturing’s supply chain crisis.
Vincent Shaw
By
Vincent Shaw
China wind farm
Image: Land Rover our Planet

  It began last July, when an accident at GCL-Poly’s factory in the westernmost region of Xinjiang took a significant chunk of polysilicon capacity offline, just as China’s PV supply chain was recovering from the initial chaos of Covid-19. Industry analysts quickly calculated the potential reduction, which would result in up to several thousand metric …

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