Industrial park solar container supply chain

How can solar PV supply chain diversification reduce supply chain risks?

Because diversification is one of the key strategies for reducing supply chain risks, the report assesses the opportunities and challenges of developing solar PV supply chains in terms of job creation, investment requirements, manufacturing costs, emissions and recycling.

Are solar PV supply chains cost-competitive?

Currently, the cost competitiveness of existing solar PV manufacturing is a key challenge to diversifying supply chains. China is the most cost-competitive location to manufacture all components of the solar PV supply chain. Costs in China are 10% lower than in India, 20% lower than in the United States, and 35% lower than in Europe.

What role will China play in the solar PV supply chain?

However, irrespective of European regional goals, China will maintain a predominant role in the solar PV supply chain due to the advantages of manufacturing capacity and costs, and the need to expand global capacity by over 1.5 times.

What are conversion factors in solar PV supply chain?

Conversion factors between segments in PV supply chain, stocks of modules, lead time for manufacturing investment by region and product, and job creation of the manufacturing by product are collected from the Special Report for Solar PV Global Supply Chain from IEA 4.

Why is supply chain development important for solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity growth?

Supply chain development is crucial for solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity growth; however, most of its crucial value chain segments are concentrated in specific geographies such as China, Europe and the United States. Hence, from a sustainability perspective, it is critical that these supply chains become more diversified and resilient.

What is a solar PV supply chain?

The supply chain itself considers the production of solar PV’s five main components: polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules. Producing each component requires input from lower-value components; namely, producing modules requires cells, producing cells requires wafers, and so on (as shown in Fig. 1a and Supplementary Fig. 1).