Solar Trackers To Become $5 Billion Annual Market

Solar Trackers have become a mainstream technology which is increasingly being used in grid scale solar panel plants. The costs have come down drastically due to an improvement in technology and growing competition. A large number of vendors have entered this area attracted by the huge growth being seen. Solar trackers used to be mainly used in the USA market, but given that the lifecycle benefits of solar trackers are much more than the costs, China and India have also seen developers use these trackers for their projects.

It is estimated that these solar trackers can increase the energy generation by almost 10-30% depending on the solar insolation but costs have only increased by around 10% of the overall cost. This means that there is a huge increase in profits by using solar trackers. While Array Technologies and NexTracker are still the biggest firms in this market, other players have started to enter making the field much more competitive. It is estimated that almost 50% of the overall tracker market will be using trackers by 2022 which means almost 35-50 GW of solar trackers will be required annually by 2022. The overall market for solar trackers should grow to around $5-7 billion by then up from just $1 billion now.

Also read Solar Tracker Manufacturers (USA,China,India) List and Market

Solar trackers in India have seen a number of players entering the market. Some of the notable ones include Mahindra, Vikram and Waaree Solar. These firms are also large solar panel makers or EPC/developers which means that they will use in-house products for their installations.  Global players such as First Solar and NexTracker are also present in India and have supplied hundreds of megawatts of products to different solar projects across the country.

Improvement in price has been mainly due to better technology and bigger scale. Steel has become the biggest cost component accounting for 70% of the cost of trackers. I expect steel prices to remain subdued given the huge structural overcapacity globally. China has got an incredible amount of capacity that its slowing economy does not need. This will keep steel prices capped and make solar tracker costs in check.