Last year, China unleashed the full power of its solar energy industry. Installed more solar panels than any other nation in U.S. history. The wholesale price of the panels it sells has been reduced by nearly half. Also, exports of fully assembled solar panels increased by 38%, and exports of main components almost doubled.
Get ready to show China's solar energy advantages even more.
While the United States and Europe are trying to revive renewable energy production and help companies avoid bankruptcy, China is far ahead.
At the annual meeting of China's Legislative Yuan this week, Premier Li Qiang, China's second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced an acceleration of construction of solar panel power plants, in addition to wind and hydropower projects.
As China's economy slumps, increased spending on renewable energy, especially solar power, is the basis for big bets on emerging technologies. Chinese leaders say the “new trio” of industries – solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries – has replaced the “old trio” of clothing, furniture and electronics.
The goal is to offset a sharp downturn in China's home construction sector. China hopes to leverage emerging industries such as solar power, which Mr. Xi likes to describe as “new productive power,” to reinvigorate an economy that has been stagnant for more than a decade.
The focus on solar power is the latest part of China's 20-year plan to reduce its dependence on energy imports.
China's solar power exports are already showing signs of urgency. In the United States, the Biden administration has introduced subsidies that cover most of the manufacturing costs of solar panels and some of the much higher installation costs.
There is a particularly strong sense of caution in Europe. Officials say that more than a decade ago, China was subsidizing its own factories to make solar panels, even though European governments were subsidizing the purchase of panels made anywhere. I feel bitter about it. This led to an explosion in consumer purchases from China, hitting Europe's solar industry.
A wave of bankruptcies hit European industry, leaving the continent largely dependent on Chinese products.
In her State of the Union address last September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, “We must never forget how China's unfair trade practices have affected our solar industry.'' “Many young companies have been displaced by heavily subsidized Chinese competitors.”
The remnants of Europe's solar industry are now disappearing. Norwegian Crystals, a major European solar panel raw material manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy last summer. Switzerland's Meyer Berger announced on February 23 that it will halt production at its Freiburg, Germany, factory in the first half of March in an effort to raise funds to complete factories in Colorado and Arizona.
The company's U.S. projects could take advantage of renewable energy manufacturing subsidies provided by President Biden's Inflation Control Act.
China's cost advantage is formidable. In a January report, the European Commission's research arm estimated that Chinese companies could produce solar panels for between 16 and 18.9 cents per watt of power generation. By contrast, European companies paid between 24.3 and 30 cents per watt, and US companies about 28 cents.
This difference partly reflects lower wages in China. Chinese cities are also offering land to solar panel factories at a fraction of the market price. Even as solar power companies are losing money and some have gone bankrupt, state-run banks are lending large sums of money at low interest rates. And Chinese companies have figured out how to build and equip factories cheaply.
China's low electricity prices make a big difference.
Manufacturing polysilicon, the main raw material for solar panels, requires a huge amount of energy. Solar panels typically need to generate electricity for at least seven months to recover the electricity they need to generate.
Coal provides two-thirds of China's electricity at low cost. But Chinese companies are cutting costs even further by installing solar power plants in the deserts of western China, where public land is essentially free. Companies then use the power from those farms to make more polysilicon.
By contrast, electricity is expensive in Europe, especially since it stopped buying natural gas from Russia during the Ukraine war. Land used for solar power plants in Europe is expensive. In the southwestern United States, environmental concerns have slowed the installation of solar power plants, while zoning issues have hindered permits to transmit renewable energy.
China's coal consumption makes it the world's largest contributor to annual greenhouse gas emissions. But the country's pioneering role in lowering the cost of solar panels has slowed emissions growth.
Kevin Tu, an energy expert in Beijing and non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Energy Policy, said: “If Chinese manufacturers hadn't reduced the cost of panels by more than 95%, we wouldn't be seeing so many installations around the world. There probably wasn't.” Columbia University.
Since 2018, the annual number of solar panel installations around the world has nearly quadrupled.
Some of the new solar power plants that will generate electricity for polysilicon production are located in two southwestern Chinese provinces: Qinghai and Yunnan. However, much of the polysilicon is produced in the Xinjiang region of northwestern China. The United States has banned imports of materials and parts manufactured using forced labor in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, where China has mainly oppressed Muslim minorities such as the Uyghurs.
In response, the United States has blocked some shipments of solar panels from China, and the European Union is considering similar measures.
Chinese companies are increasingly doing the early, high-value stages of solar panel manufacturing in China, then shipping the components to overseas factories for final assembly. This would allow shipments to bypass trade barriers such as tariffs that President Donald J. Trump has imposed on many Chinese imports. Some of China's biggest solar panel manufacturers are building final assembly plants in the United States to take advantage of subsidies provided as part of the Anti-Inflation Act.
The legislation includes massive subsidies to revive the U.S. solar panel industry, which almost completely collapsed a decade ago in the face of low-cost imports from China. However, building a self-sustaining industry will be difficult.
China produces virtually all of the world's solar panel manufacturing equipment and nearly all of the supply of every solar panel component, from wafers to specialty glass.
“We have the know-how and are working with Chinese solar companies that are setting up assembly operations in the U.S.,” said Ocean Yuan, CEO of Grape Solar in Eugene, Oregon. Told. state.
That know-how was once located in the United States. Back in 2010, solar panel manufacturers in China relied primarily on imported equipment and faced long and costly delays if something went wrong.
“It took days to weeks to find replacement parts and technicians,” said Frank Haugwitz, a longtime solar energy consultant specializing in the Chinese industry.
In 2010, Silicon Valley company Applied Materials built two large research labs in Xi'an, a city in western China famous for its Terracotta Warriors. Each laboratory was the size of two soccer fields. They aimed to conduct a final test of a robotic assembly line that could mass-produce solar panels with virtually no human labor.
But within a few years, Chinese companies figured out how to do it themselves. Applied Materials drastically cut back on production of solar panel tools and focused on making similar equipment that makes semiconductors.
Currently, anyone looking to manufacture solar panels outside of China faces potential delays in equipment installation and repair.
“It's still a challenge for Europeans to compete,” Haugwitz said, as Europe considers whether to follow the U.S. example and set its own subsidies and import restrictions for solar products.
Joy Don and Li Yu Contributed to research.
