Welcome to the PV Chart of the Week, produced in tandem with our colleagues at PV Tech Research. This week, we look at India’s solar cell production and capacity growth in the past five years.
Since 2022, capacity growth has been exponential, nearly doubling every year from less than 3GW to nearly 50GW of annual nameplate capacity by the end of 2026. This leaves a more than 10GW gap of solar cell capacity that is currently listed in India’s Approved List of Models and Manufacturers (ALMM) List-II; the latest update, made earlier this month, lists just under 40GW of solar cell capacity.
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When looking at production numbers for solar cells in India, the growth between 2022 and 2026 has gone from around 1GW to more than 29GW. The leading technology in solar cell production is PERT/TOPCon technology with 13GW, followed by PERC with 11GW. Most of the growth for PERT/TOPCon has occurred between last year and this year, including the recent commissioning of Premier Energies’ 7GW annual nameplate solar cell facility in the south-eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.
Meanwhile, this year will see the first gigawatt of heterojunction (HJT) production to come online, from Indian solar cell manufacturer Reliance Industries, which was added to the ALMM List-II in April.
The remaining capacity comes from the US thin-film cadmium telluride module manufacturer First Solar, while there are currently no back-contact solar cells.
However, this could be changing in the coming years. Radovan Kopecek, co-founder and director of the German solar energy research institute ISC Konstanz, spoke with PV Tech at the PV CellTech USA Conference in San Francisco this week, saying that TOPCon Back Contact (BTC) cells should start appearing in 2028.
