According to Experts, the Solar Panel Sector is too Dependent on China

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Solar panels and all the technology behind them should no longer come almost exclusively from China. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), meeting climate targets will not be possible without additional supply chains in other countries.

Global solar panel production capacity has increasingly moved from Europe, Japan and the United States to China in the past decade, according to a new report from the energy think tank. Thanks to all their investment and innovation, the Chinese now account for more than 80 percent of the market and that share is likely to increase further to more than 95 percent in the coming years.

“China has played an important role in lowering the cost of solar energy worldwide,” explains IEA Director Fatih Birol. But the fact that the sector is so concentrated in China also comes with limitations, he says. He points to delays and higher prices due to delivery problems. Partly due to the strict corona restrictions in China, the bottlenecks have recently come to the fore.

But to meet international energy and climate goals, the global deployment of solar panels must grow on an unprecedented scale, according to estimates by his agency. This would require a major additional expansion of production capacity. For example, for important raw materials, including polysilicon, capacity should be more than twice as high by 2030 as it is now.

The report also states that the solar panel industry in China itself mainly runs on energy from coal. Of course, changing that also helps with the climate approach. Yet the IEA does not mention this as a very big argument for having more solar panels made in other countries.

This is because solar panels would have recovered the substantial CO2 emissions in their production phase on average within four to eight months once they generate their own energy. According to the think tank, that is relatively short if you assume that solar panels can last 25 to 30 years.