By Jo Nova
Europe’s solar manufacturers are in a crisis
Forty year old German solar panel producers are closing factories they only opened three years ago.
The world now has the capacity to make 1,600 GW of solar panels annually, but demand has unexpectedly flat-lined — staying at barely 500GW. In a world awash with solar panels that no one needs, prices have fallen dramatically, but that hasn’t solved the glut which is so bad, people are usingsolar panels for fencing in Europe.
The CCP has bet big that the exponential growth curve in solar customers was going to keep being exponential. Instead, demand flattened off suddenly. Currently, 80% of the world’s solar panels are pouring out of China.
With impeccable timing, just weeks ago the Australian Government threw a billion dollars at a program to help Australia become a solar panel superfactory just at the moment when China is practically giving them away.
Rachel Millard and Amanda Chu, Financial Times
“There is overcapacity in every segment, starting with polysilicon and finishing with the module,” said Yana Hryshko, head of global solar supply chain research at the consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
According to BloombergNEF, panel prices have plunged more than 60 percent since July 2022. The scale of the damage inflicted has sparked calls for Brussels to protect European companies from what the industry says are state-subsidized Chinese products.
Europe’s solar panel manufacturing capacity has collapsed by about half to 3 gigawatts since November as companies have failed, mothballed facilities, or shifted production abroad, the European Solar Manufacturing Council estimates.
The Salad Days of Solar Power are behind us
The sudden death of the solar boom is due to rising interest rates which take the fun out of getting a loan, but it’s also due torising electricity costs, which increase the prices of everything, including solar panels themselves and the batteries they need to back them up.
But there’s an argument to be made that the grid itself has reached the limit. The Duck Curve has been quacking on grids inCaliforniaandAustralia for years. Ponder that in towns likeAlice Springsthe microgrid is in danger of falling over whena cloud rolls in, and only 1 in 4 homes there have solar panels. Indeed, in the sunny centre of Australia, the limit for solar power appears to be just 13% — meaning it’s hard to stabilize the grid when more than 13% of the annual supply is made from solar power.
When storms knocked over a high voltage line in South Australia the first thing the government did was to ask people toswitch off their solar panelsso they wouldn’t crash the grid.
Even on the big grids, there’s already such a glut of solar panels on homes, that the midday surge of “green” electrons is causingvoltage surgeswhich can damage other equipment.Solar “feed in” tariffsto homeowners areshrinkingto nothing, or even going negative themselves. In Adelaide and Perth the government now insists people installing solar panels get smart meters so the grid managers can remotely switch off their panels. Worse, in Sydneysolar home owners now have to payto dump unwanted solar power on the grid at lunchtime.
Then there’s the mayhem of negative prices on national markets which is driving baseload providers off the grid and out of business. Large industrial generators arerestructuring their businessesto accommodate the crazy pricing.
Last word: China already controls 80% of the market, would it really want to dump so many solar panels it drove the last 20% out of business, or was this just one huge Big-Government mistake?
JoNova (joannenova.com.au)
