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.
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.
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.
Molly Lempriere investigates how much land the UK needs for utility-scale PV plants as it transitions to net zero, and whether the sector’s growth poses any threat to food security.
As reports come in predicting stunted growth for Indian solar in 2023, PV Tech Premium spoke to Vinay Rustagi, managing director of Bridge To India, about the obstacles facing the sector in the next year and the prospect of light at the end of the tunnel.
