Success in solar energy may be a curse for Chinese panel manufacturers

livemint.com:

Ever since photovoltaic cells started popping up on pocket calculators and building roofs a few decades ago, solar power has faced a key drawback: It’s a nice technology, but there’s simply not enough of it to make a difference. Right now, it’s facing the opposite difficulty. A tidal wave of investment in solar-power panels has swelled to the point that it threatens to overwhelm the global industry.

Amid an onslaught of cheap Chinese-made modules, overseas manufacturers have either walled themselves off behind tariff barriers (as in India and the US) or resigned themselves to extinction, as in Europe. Now, even the Chinese companies blamed for the current glut are panicking. Beijing should introduce bidding rules to prevent low-quality, below-cost products being put onto the market, Zhong Baoshen, chairman of the biggest panel maker, Longi Green Energy Technology, said last week.

The slump in prices is so drastic that there is now “no profit across the entire supply chain," Gao Jifan, Zhong’s counterpart at third-placed Trina Solar Company, told a BloombergNEF summit last November. From the perspective of manufacturing, the solar bit of the path to net-zero is already pretty much solved. The world will need to install about 650 gigawatts of solar capacity a year by 2030 to avoid catastrophic climate change, according to the International Energy Agency.

But major manufacturers have already built about 783GW of annual production capacity and we might hit the IEA’s 2030 installation target this year. The hitch is that it’s a lot harder to connect a solar panel than to make one. Utilities and even households face regulatory, political and logistical roadblocks joining the grid.