Driven by soaring electricity prices and more competitive prices of solar LCOE, new solar installations around the globe are expected to reach 414 gigawatts (GW), and the optimistic forecast expects 446 GW to be installed in 2023, which would be 60.1%/ 72.4% increase in total new capacity compared to 2022. Trendforce has increased its build forecast yet again, particularly due to acceleration in China but also due to rapid build in other established markets, and updates on the global situation as of 3Q 2023.
* Polysilicon makers have reduced production, and prices have stabilized. But margins of P-type products across the value chain are under pressure, as competition is intense among Chinese manufacturers and P-type module inventory is high in some large markets due to the increasingly obvious cost-performance advantage of N-type technology.
* China is installing huge volumes of solar, and it is increasingly clear that local plans and targets for build serve as a lower bound rather than an upper one on what actually happens. Meanwhile, Trendforce expects emerging markets including MENA, South Africa, Asia, and South East Asia to add tens of gigawatts (GW) of capacity this year, as those regions respond to chronic power outages.
* Increasingly, more and more utility-scale, C&I, residential, and off-grid systems worldwide are being paired with storage. The record low cost of energy storage and the maturity of the safest ever liquid cooling ESS escalates solar deployment.
* It can be stated that P-type is out of stage, BC cells are limited and hardly getting cheaper, second HJT is only very slowly dropping in price and has much less track record, and perovskite is not really happening. What has already come bursting onto the scene is N-type TOPCon or (TOPCon and perovskite synthetic which is in the R&D stage)
In its report, Trendforce also illustrated the disconnect in some sources of information between historic projections regarding solar panels and actual developments, which miss some key factors and are exponentially behind. It has explained how it was conducted to be pretty thorough and suitable for making a pretty picture.
Comparing Yearly Growth with Reality
If we want to predict yearly additions, we can make a close approximation in mathematical terms by adding DC side connected capacity (officially registered statistic + unregistered) plus general speaking inventory (on sea, in warehouse, and project onsite)
What this means in simple terms is that every single time since the future of photovoltaics was first predicted, it was assumed that this sector would hardly grow or even contract, even though this runs contrary to the observed reality. Looking back, the historical data of annual PV additions has always been far beyond predictions produced by some institutions that are too conservative.
So that leaves us with two possibilities. The first is that the policy ambitions for photovoltaics increased dramatically every time. The New Policies Scenario assumes that ambitions stay constant and that this translates into new policies being enacted when old policies expire. So a country currently stimulating PV would keep doing that indefinitely in this scenario, China is an example. The second possibility is that some institutions have a habit of dramatically underestimating photovoltaic growth.
