How China captured the sun – and cast a shadow over Europe

UK plans mean ‘we will be covering an area of countryside the size of Middlesex with Chinese solar panels’ by 2035, while China’s market share in the EU has reached 97%. Can energy/climate policymakers explain what is supposed to happen to all these millions of panels at replacement time?
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Europe’s ambitious plans to expand green energy generation with “Made in EU” solar panels face a distinctly cloudy future as the continent faces a massive glut of the devices, says The Telegraph (via Yahoo News).

Millions of solar panels are piling up in warehouses across the Continent because of a manufacturing battle in China, where cut-throat competition has driven the world’s biggest panel-makers to expand production far faster than they can be installed.

The supply glut has caused solar panel prices to halve.

This sounds like great news for the EU, which recently pledged to triple its solar power capacity to 672 gigawatts by 2030. That’s roughly equivalent to 200 large nuclear power stations.

In reality, though, it has caused a crisis. Under the EU’s “Green Deal Industrial Plan”, 40pc of the panels to be spread across European fields and roofs were meant to be made by European manufacturers.

However, the influx of cheap Chinese alternatives means that instead of tooling up, manufacturers are pulling out of the market or becoming insolvent. Last year 97pc of the solar panels installed across Europe came from China.

The European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC) has warned of a looming “wave of bankruptcies” including Dutch panel producer Exasun and Austrian module manufacturer Energetic.
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The sheer scale of the problem was revealed in a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

It warned that although the world was installing at record rates of around 400 gigawatts a year, manufacturing capacity was growing far faster.

By the end of this year solar panel factories, mostly in China, will be capable of churning out 1,100 gigawatts a year – nearly three times more than the world is ready for. For comparison, that’s about 11 times the UK’s entire generating capacity.

Britain is less involved. Its last remaining solar panel maker, GB-Sol, caters to niche and upmarket customers, not the mass market, so we have little choice but China.

The Government’s solar taskforce is about to publish the UK Solar Roadmap, which will commit the UK to an even greater reliance on the People’s Republic.

Chris Hewett, chief executive of Solar Energy UK, the industry’s trade body, chaired the taskforce with energy minister Andrew Bowie. Hewett said the report would recommend a fourfold expansion of UK solar power.

That means Britain’s solar farms will expand from 18 gigawatts now to 70 gigawatts by 2035 – mostly in big solar farms across the English and Welsh countryside. In practical terms we will be covering an area of countryside the size of Middlesex with Chinese solar panels.

When the sun shines on Europe and the UK, it is the Chinese who are smiling.

Full article here.
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Image: UK solar installation [credit: BBC]