Clean solar container industry chain

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.

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 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).

Should PV supply chains be localized and maintained?

Overall, localizing and maintaining PV supply chains will depend not only on investment, but also on rapidly expanding the available workforce. Global supply chains also feature strong environmental and social trade-offs.

How can the solar PV industry support growing demand?

Annual investment levels need to double throughout the supply chain. Critical sectors such as polysilicon, ingots and wafers would attract the majority of investment to support growing demand. The solar PV industry could create 1 300 manufacturing jobs for each gigawatt of production capacity.

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.