Chinese solar company Longi has transformed the global solar industry by managing to produce monocrystalline solar ingots and wafers at a much lower cost than the overall industry and has almost single-handedly transformed the industry’s dominant technology. The company has been rapidly expanding capacity to take advantage of its low-cost production process and currently has […]
The upstream part of the solar supply chain was the only part where Chinese companies were not dominating the market completely. Due to the complex chemical processes of making high-grade polysilicon, Chinese companies imported large quantities of pure grade silicon from Germany, the USA, and Korea. The initial years of the solar boom had led […]
The fall in Chinese demand in 2019 had led to a sharp fall in the prices of the upstream solar supply chain namely polysilicon, wafers, and solar cells. This has put a lot of pressure on the players which focus exclusively on those parts of the supply chain. Wacker the German chemicals giant which has […]
Even before the election of Donald Trump, solar energy had witnessed a war between the USA and China with both countries having imposed anti-subsidy and anti-dumping duties on each other. The USA started the war by imposing duties on imports of Chinese solar cells and panels which was followed by China putting stiff duties on […]
The solar capacity additions in China dropped to just 30 GW down from around 45 GW in 2018. The 30 GW was also much ahead of forecasts as almost 40% of the year’s entire total capacity got added in December of 2019 itself. China peaked at 53 GW in 2018 and since then the total […]
Thin film technology in the early parts of the decade was looked upon as a competitor for crystalline silicon solar technology. However, the rapid scale-up and reducing costs of silicon solar technology made many of the thin film startups go bust one by one, as they could not climb up the technology curve fast enough. […]