Chinese solar module manufacturers are ramping to more than 750 GW of modules in 2024. This will be over 50% annual growth over the 499 GW they delivered in 2023, according to the China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA). China solar manufacturing industry should produce 820 GW of solar cells, up from the 545 GW in 2023. Silicon wafer output is also expected to exceed 935 GW this year considering the expansion plans of leading companies in the space. Last year, the country rolled out close to 622 GW, having gone up 67.5% YoY (see China’s Solar PV Output In 2023 Exceeded RMB 1.7 Trillion).
After delivering 1.43 million tons of polysilicon last year with a 67% annual increase, China is looking at over 2.1 million tons this year, according to the CPIA that makes this forecast in its recently released China Photovoltaic Industry Development Roadmap (2023-2024).
China’s solar industry employed 3.5 million people in 2022 and this could be 5-6 million by the end of 2025.
For 2024, the association forecasts China to install up to 220 GW AC new PV additions with land constraints and grid capacity as the major challenges, after growing to 216.30 GW AC in 2023.
The current investment cost of operationalizing a 10,000-ton trichlorosilane polysilicon production line is RMB 90 million/thousand tons (USD12.4 million per thousand tons). Expecting technological improvements, the investment/thousand tons will drop to RMB 80 million by 2030 (USD11 million per thousand tons).
Even when it comes to silicon wafer thickness, the thinner the better. The average thickness of polysilicon wafers in 2023 was 170 μm. While the CPIA does not see any change to this value this year, it believes it can change in the later years.
Wafer Sizes
There are various wafer sizes for solar cells in the market today. The the share of 182 mm square wafers is 47.7%, while that of rectangular derivates of M10 format such as 182mm x 183.75mm, 182mm x 185.3 mm, which are termed as micro-rectangular by CPIA (using machine language translation), is 20.3%, but these may phase out of the market in 2028.
The market share of 210 mm square wafers and rectangular wafers in 2023 was 20% and 10%, respectively. The latter most likely refers to the half cut wafers that are so far used only in HJT processing. Going forward, these may become the future mainstream size, but these will still need continuous verification by the market.
The TOPCon n-type silicon wafer products for solar cells and heterojunction (HJT) cells have strong motivation to reduce thickness. The average thickness of n-type silicon wafers used in TOPCon cells is 125 μm, and the thickness of silicon wafers used in heterojunction cells is about 120μm, which is a decrease of 15μm and 5μm respectively compared with 2022.
Efficiency
In 2023, the average mass production solar cell efficiency of PERC cells reached 23.4%, 25% for TOPCon and 25.2% for HJT. By 2025, the CPIA forecasts the same to increase to 23.7%, 25.7% and 26.2%, respectively. It does not see any major breakthroughs going forward since its guidance for 2028 for these cell technologies is a maximum of 24%, 26.5% and 26.8%, respectively. For HJT efficiency, it factors in half cells of 182 mm and 210 mm formats, which has evolved as the state of the art for HJT.
Inverters
Among inverters, string inverters accounted for 80% market share last year while central inverters claimed the remaining share. The association foresees great uncertainty in the market shares of different types of inverters as changes take place in application scenarios and technology evolves.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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In the future, the electricity value will be near to zero something like WIFI or is today
If solar is all you have the price of electricity will be negative when the sun is shining (it’s a waste product you need to get rid of, since the grid doesn’t want it and can’t handle it). When the sun is not shining or doesn’t meet demand the price of electricity will be very high. Storage is just too expensive and it is needed on all scales from intra day (shifting the peak and supplying at night) to intra-weekly (rainy days) to seasonal.
This doesn’t mean that the average cost of electricity goes down, it means that average cost goes way up to support the various overlapping backup systems, batteries, pumped hydro, flywheels, electricity-to-compressed-hydrogen-back-to-electricity and other stupid stuff required.
This will in practice never happen. There is no path from here to there. Solar will grow like a parasite, reducing the quality of the grid until the cost of adding more solar onto the grid will eventually be pushed back on the people who want to install grid-connected solar instead of them being subsidized. At that point grid connected solar will be a no-go.
To some extent you can keep adding more solar and only supplying electricity when the grid can handle it (overbuild) but this is a very expensive way to do it.
No, Na-Ion batteries may comes a low as 10 usd/kWh.
With 1000 cycles, you add 0,01 usd/kWh to the cost pr consumed kWh, so cheap.
No. Even that overly optimistic cost is too expensive.
You need seasonal storage to squeeze out fossil fuels from the grid. If the batteries last 20 years or 1000 cycles; whichever arrives sooner; you’ll only get 20 cycles out of those batteries and you’ll need a lot more of them than you need for intra-day peak shifting. And it will likely not work at all because of self-discharge.
This gets you back to needing a patchwork of overlapping storage solutions on all different scales combined with overbuild.
To completely electrify, to the same level of energy use currently in europe, you need 5 GWyear pr year pr 1 million people, so in round numbers China will need 50,000 GW of solar panels, and a world of 10 billion people will need 500,000 GW (assuming 10% capacity factor)
If the world has 1000 GW now, then add 750, and the 750 keeps growing by 50% pr year, we will reach 500000 GW by 2038
I think more realistic is the production capacity will level out at 1/20 of 500000, or 25000 to match the replacement rate, reaching 500 TW by 2050.
This is still only 25 years from now. I would be very hesitant to invest in anything thats not competitive.
In term of energy consumed, the world will need 4,4E17 Wh/year and I think solar output pr area is 1E11 Wh/km2, so we need 4,4 million km2 of solar harvesting areas; a square 2100 km pr side.
An interesting sidenote is that 1 person needs 0,00044 km2 of panels, so if you multiply by population density you get the fraction of land that must be covered.
So a place like the Netherlands (extreme example) with 425 people pr km2 will need 19% of the land for harvesting…
750 GW worth of panels. Look at that number, stare at it. In just one year. Cheaply. No fuss, no cost overruns. Coupled with similarly growing battery storage (also with ever cheaper costs), this energy revolution will bowl over existing sources, to the chagrin of entrenched energy interests. Money is money, and investors will continue chasing the best investment. And that’s renewables.
No, it will grow like a parasite on the grid until the grid can no longer handle it. Solar overbuild + storage will never be viable. Then the subsidies go away and the parasite will have to bear its own costs. You want to feed electricity nobody wants into the grid when the sun is shining? Sure, you get paid a negative electricity price (think of it as a disposal fee for unwanted power). You want to withdraw electricity at 8 PM same as everyone else? Sure, cheapest supplier is gas and hydro and batteries is a distant tenth somewhere.
This is a bridge to nowhere. It will just entrench fossil fuels.