Special Report on Solar PV Global Supply Chains Solar PV is a crucial pillar of clean energy transitions worldwide, underpinning efforts to reach international energy and climate goals. Over the last decade, the amount of solar PV deployed around the world has increased massively while its costs have declined drastically.
As the PV cell is the essential component of the PV value chain, converting sunlight into electricity by reduced cost and increased efficiency has been heatedly discussed in the existing literature. Technology innovation drives the development of competing or emerging technological trajectories.
Therefore, a PV supply chain is mainly composed of a photovoltaic assembler (will be called assembler or PA in this paper) and its C-Pi module supplier (will be called supplier or MS). In practice, a large PA normally sources from a large MS who does not supply to the competing PAs of similar market scale.
Currently, the cost competitiveness of existing solar PV manufacturing is a key challenge to diversifying supply chains. China is the most cost-competitive location to manufacture all components of the solar PV supply chain. Costs in China are 10% lower than in India, 20% lower than in the United States, and 35% lower than in Europe.
... Table 1 depicts, solar PV supply chains comprise three parts: Polysilicon (upstream); Wafer, Cell, and Module (midstream); and, Installation (downstream). This following describes some market strategies to achieve scale and to overcome transaction costs by bringing external imperfect markets for information under internal control. ...
Because diversification is one of the key strategies for reducing supply chain risks, the report assesses the opportunities and challenges of developing solar PV supply chains in terms of job creation, investment requirements, manufacturing costs, emissions and recycling.