The development of China's photovoltaic industry
2022-12-30
At the beginning of this century, China's photovoltaic industry is still in its infancy, China's photovoltaic products accounted for very little global market share, 20 years of the world's photovoltaic industry landscape has undergone tremendous changes, China's photovoltaic industry first experienced the stage of brutal growth, by 2008 China's photovoltaic production capacity has surpassed Germany, ranking first in the world, the proportion of production capacity accounted for nearly half of the world. With the spread of the global economic crisis in 2008, Chinese photovoltaic enterprises have also been hit. Since 2011, the United States, the European Union, Japan, India and other major economies in the world have launched anti-dumping and countervailing investigations into China's PV industry, which has fallen into a period of confusion and vicious competition among domestic PV companies, with a number of Chinese PV companies suffering long-term losses and going bankrupt.
The Chinese government has supported and subsidized the PV industry for many years, and at the early stage of PV industry development, local governments offered attractive preferential policies and loan terms for PV projects when attracting investment due to performance considerations, and PV enterprises were mainly concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta region, such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In addition, the pollution problems caused by solar panel production have triggered massive protests by residents.
China's State Council introduced a subsidy policy for PV power generation in 2013, and China's installed PV capacity surged from 19 million kilowatts in 2013 to about 310 million kilowatts in 2021. The Chinese government began phasing out subsidies for PV and wind power starting in 2021.
As a result of the incentives introduced by the Chinese government and technological innovation in the PV industry, the average cost of PV manufacturing worldwide has dropped by 80% in ten years, which has led to exponential growth in PV manufacturing capacity, and China has an absolute price advantage in PV module production costs, which are 35% lower than Europe, 20% lower than the US, and even 10% lower than India.
