In the six months since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed into law, the US has seen over 100,000 new clean energy jobs created across 31 states as companies begin to capitalise on the incentives and security that the bill offers.
With silicon material and wafer prices on the rise, the impact is being felt further downstream amid warnings module prices could continue increasing this month.
2022 saw the arrival of DAS Solar as one of the PV industry’s rising stars, the five-year-old company attracting strategic investment from, among others, China Merchants Venture Capital, Three Gorges Capital and Yongfu Shares.
Amid potential supply chain bottlenecks as China increases its PV manufacturing dominance, companies in markets such as the US, India and Europe are looking to leverage new policy support to scale up domestic production. Jules Scully charts the industry’s efforts to onshore solar module manufacturing.
The future of solar module deployment may be rooted in mass, rapid deployment rather than precisely tilted, steel-mounted and spaced-out panels extending over acres of land. So says Australian company 5B, which manufactures accordion-style folding solar arrays that arrive at a project site flat-packed and ready to be deployed.
Silicon materials producer REC Silicon has concluded a 10-year agreement with South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Solutions to offer fluidised bed reactor (FBR) polysilicon.
Solar investors believe that Europe can be a competitive market for PV manufacturing and compete with the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as ESG and energy security concerns will drive money to the continent.
