China Solar Makers Productions Growing Over 50% to Over 750 GW of Solar Modules
By Brian Wang from Taiyang New and China Photovoltaic Industry Association sources
Chinese solar module manufacturers are ramping to more than 750 GW of modules in 2024. This will be over 50% annual growth over the 499 GW they delivered in 2023, according to the China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA). China solar manufacturing industry should produce 820 GW of solar cells, up from the 545 GW in 2023. Silicon wafer output is also expected to exceed 935 GW this year considering the expansion plans of leading companies in the space. Last year, the country rolled out close to 622 GW, having gone up 67.5% YoY (see China’s Solar PV Output In 2023 Exceeded RMB 1.7 Trillion).
After delivering 1.43 million tons of polysilicon last year with a 67% annual increase, China is looking at over 2.1 million tons this year, according to the CPIA that makes this forecast in its recently released China Photovoltaic Industry Development Roadmap (2023-2024).
China's solar industry employed 3.5 million people in 2022 and this could be 5-6 million by the end of 2025.
For 2024, the association forecasts China to install up to 220 GW AC new PV additions with land constraints and grid capacity as the major challenges, after growing to 216.30 GW AC in 2023.
The current investment cost of operationalizing a 10,000-ton trichlorosilane polysilicon production line is RMB 90 million/thousand tons (USD12.4 million per thousand tons). Expecting technological improvements, the investment/thousand tons will drop to RMB 80 million by 2030 (USD11 million per thousand tons).
Even when it comes to silicon wafer thickness, the thinner the better. The average thickness of polysilicon wafers in 2023 was 170 μm. While the CPIA does not see any change to this value this year, it believes it can change in the later years.
Wafer Sizes
There are various wafer sizes for solar cells in the market today. The the share of 182 mm square wafers is 47.7%, while that of rectangular derivates of M10 format such as 182mm x 183.75mm, 182mm x 185.3 mm, which are termed as micro-rectangular by CPIA (using machine language translation), is 20.3%, but these may phase out of the market in 2028.
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