Investors from Solarcentury and Actis imparted wisdom on how to manage the risks and reap the benefits of African PV at Solar Media’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe event.
This article explains the evolution of p-type multi module efficiencies and average power levels between 2013 and 2018 (forecasted), showing for the first time the output of new findings by our in-house market research team at PV-Tech’s parent company Solar Media Ltd.
While third-party outsourcing of solar PV module assembly has been a constant feature of the PV industry for many years, the landscape of suppliers and the country of manufacturing has changed radically in the past two years, and will continue to do so out to the end of 2018.
While there is no shortage of leading indicators in the PV industry that can be used to predict future trends in manufacturing and across the various companies involved in this space, one of the most pertinent ones relates to capital expenditure (or capex).
In the past few days, we have featured some of the key trends in the solar industry during 2016, including the changing face of c-Si cell spending and the strong capex into new facilities in countries such as Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. The technology split of solar cells produced in 2016 was also reviewed, showing the resilience of p-type multi and the factors that have been holding back further market-share gains for p-type mono.
Yesterday, we exclusively revealed the top-10 solar cell producers for 2016. In the second part of our top-10 series, we can now reveal for the first time the top-10 module suppliers to the solar industry for 2016.
Whilst clean energy might be thought of as a partisan issue in the States, when it comes to installing solar, political parties are irrelevant, according to a new study by PowerScout.
There are many key metrics worth listing at the end of each year in the solar industry. In terms of the upstream/manufacturing side, two jump out as leading indicators for the year ahead.
The first is to rank the top-10 producers of the solar cells during the year.
Solar cells produced using p-type multi c-Si wafers retained their dominant market-share position in 2016, despite significant investments into p-type mono and advanced cell production, such as PERC. The transition to increased mono wafer use is now expected to be seen more clearly during 2017 and 2018, but depends still upon the relative end-market demand from the domestic Chinese market.
Capital expenditure (capex) for solar cell manufacturing is to see increased contributions in 2017 from Vietnam, India and Thailand, expanding the global footprint of cell manufacturing outside China across different countries in the Asia region.
