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.
The largest solar investment in US history, a pivot to a vertically integrated PV manufacturing facility in the state of Georgia by Qcells, was enabled by a combination of state support, federal government investment and related benefits coming from the Inflation Reduction (IRA), according to the company.
CubicPV, a US solar manufacturer backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is looking to leverage support included in the country’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to set up what it claims will be the largest PV wafer manufacturing facility outside of China.
CSI Solar has announced plans to expand its solar and battery storage manufacturing capacity in China, through an investment agreement with the municipal government of Yangzhou City in Jiangsu Province.
Investment in the global energy transition totaled US$1.1 trillion in 2022 according to analyst firm BloombergNEF, reaching parity with investment in fossil fuels for the first time ever.
Lawmakers from both sides of the US House of Representatives have issued a resolution to repeal President Joe Biden’s waiver on solar import tariffs from Southeast Asia.
