Chinese solar PV manufacturer Talesun and French renewable energy giant Neoen have entered into a strategic partnership to develop both companies’ presence and expansion in the European PV market.
The partnership is intended to take advantage of the incentives put in place by the EU to accelerate the continent’s solar deployment, and Talesun said that the agreement was reached “following an in-depth discussion on the current situation and future development trends of the European photovoltaic industry”.
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In the closing days of last year, the European Council announced emergency measures to cap solar permitting times to three months and introduce renewable energy ‘go-to zones’ in which clean energy projects are assumed to be of ‘overriding public interest’. The laws represented the latest addition to the EU’s REPowerEU Scheme, introduced in 2022 to reduce the bloc’s dependence on Russian-imported gas.
Yabin Xing, senior VP of overseas marketing, sales and operation at Talesun Solar said: “The strategic partnership between Talesun Solar and Neoen is based on their respective competitiveness and advantages in technical resources in the PV sector. We are honoured to collaborate with a global leader in the renewable energy sector so we can jointly create outstanding PV power projects through the application of highly efficient, reliable PV modules.”
A report from the China Photovoltaic Industry Association last month said that European demand had accounted for an 86% rise year-on-year in Chinese module exports in the first ten months of 2022, with the Netherlands alone accounting for 27% of the country’s exports from January-September.
However this reliance on Chinese imports has been put under scrutiny in recent months, and the recent launch of the European Solar PV Industry Alliance – seeking to establish 30GW of manufacturing capacity by 2025 – may see this dominance challenged.
Talesun said that from June 2021 to June 2022 it delivered 805MW of module capacity to Europe, 349.5MW of which was shipped to France.
Neoen’s installed solar PV capacity reached 5.6GW in mid-2022, and the company has said that it forecasts 10GW of capacity by 2025. It recently began construction on a 272MWp facility in Portugal, said to be the largest in the country.
In December SolarPower Europe published a report saying that solar deployment in the EU rose 47% in 2022 compared with 2021, with over 41GW of capacity installed over the year.