Solar industry development: technological breakthroughs and market challenges coexist
In recent years, the solar industry has continued to be the focus of the global energy sector, with exciting new technologies and trends emerging, as well as some market challenges.
Technological breakthroughs lead the industry upgrading
Record high cell efficiency: China's scientific research team has made a series of major breakthroughs in the field of solar cell technology. Among them, the steady-state photoelectric conversion efficiency of 1.05 square centimeters of all-perovskite tandem solar cells prepared by the team of Professor Tan Hairen of Nanjing University and Renshuo Solar (Suzhou) Co., Ltd. reached 28.2%, setting a new world record for all-perovskite tandem solar cells at this scale, and the relevant results have been included in the internationally authoritative "Solar Cell Efficiency Table"3.
Progress of tandem cell technology: The scientific research team of Beijing Institute of Technology and other domestic units has successfully broken through the technical problems of the preparation of perovskite/crystalline silicon tandem solar cells, and developed perovskite/crystalline silicon tandem solar cells with a photoelectric conversion efficiency of 32.5% and long-term operation stability, which provides a new direction and possibility for the development of solar cell technology5.
Exploration of new materials and processes: LONGi Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd., as the first unit, published a research paper online in the journal Nature, reporting the research results of breaking through the photoelectric conversion efficiency of crystalline silicon cells by 27% through the all-laser patterning process, and at the same time developing a new type of dense heterojunction passivation contact, breaking through the bottleneck of 180-210°C heterojunction preparation that has been in the industry, and laying the foundation for low-cost and efficient BC cell production.
Market structure and coping strategies
Responding to U.S. tariff pressures: The U.S. has lifted tariff exclusions on solar panel imports from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia, leading Chinese solar companies to relocate factories from Vietnam to the next place where they can circumvent U.S. tariffs, such as Indonesia and Laos, with planned capacity enough to meet half of the U.S. market demand last year, as reported by Reuters on November 41.
Changes in market demand and corporate adjustments: Solar inverter maker Enphase Energy said on Friday that it would cut about 17% of its workforce globally in response to a slowdown in residential solar demand, and the company has been grappling with the deterioration of Europe's residential solar market by concentrating its contract manufacturing operations at its existing four locations6.
Macro trends in the development of the industry
Rapid growth in installed capacity: The deployment of solar has accelerated exponentially, with the 2 terawatt installed capacity milestone achieved in recent years. From 1954 to 2022, it took the solar PV industry 68 years to reach 1 TW of installed capacity, and it took only 2 years to reach the next 1 TW (2022-2024)7.
Policy support and development goals: China's solar power generation is growing at an unprecedented speed and scale, with China's installed solar power capacity increasing by more than 55% year-on-year in 2023. To achieve the goal of tripling global installed renewable energy capacity by 2030 to maintain the world's 1.5 degrees Celsius, countries need to work for:
