Solar firms in recovery mode
Jun-12-2014 By : fcccadmin
Consolidation is deepening in China’s solar-energy industry, as competition on the domestic market continues and companies face global trade barriers. “It is a recovery year,” Stuart Brannigan, Vice President of Sales and Marketing Europe and America ZNSHINE Solar said. “We have toughed out the supply glut and shrinking demand after several countries cut tariffs and subsidies.” The ZNSHINE Group was established in Jintan, Jiangsu province, in 1988. Consolidation will go on, leaving only five to 10 mega-companies on the market with big output, Brannigan said. “It is quite similar to what happened to the semiconductor industry. It does not mean that all small companies cannot survive. They have to be more flexible and better tap the niche market just like boutique hotels,” he said. Twenty-four of China’s 32 listed solar companies were profitable last year. Eight of them doubled their net profit. “Industry insiders are becoming more rational on the China market,” Zhang Weiming, Vice President of Technology with Heraeus, said. “Many have learned lessons over the past several years when suffering from oversupply. Meanwhile, more emphasis is going to quality control as solar plant installation expands.” Heraeus is a precious metal and technology firm headquartered in Hanau near Frankfurt, Germany. It will open a new front-side paste production site in China, its biggest market.
Rooftop solar projects hindered by cautious bank lending
By : fcccadmin
The installation volume of rooftop solar panels in China has fallen well short of expectations this year owing to the cautious attitude of banks in lending to the sector. This means the industry will have difficulty reaching the goal of 14 gigawatt (GW) of solar panel installations this year, Wang Jin, Director of the National Development and Reform Commission’s Institute of International Energy, said. However, activity is expected to pick up rapidly in the year’s second half, once issues worrying financiers and investors are resolved, since the central government is working hard on giving banks confidence to provide funding to project developers, Wang added. “Since this year is the maiden year that rooftop solar power projects are being commercialized on a big scale, it takes time to make adjustments to address some new issues,” he told a solar industry conference in Shanghai. He said less than 2 GW of rooftop panel installations has been completed so far this year, far short of the NEA’s full-year target of 8 GW. The NEA has also set an installation goal of 6 GW of ground-mounted solar farms that rely on power grid operators to buy all of their output. Ground-mounted projects used to dominate installations, but since China’s richest solar resource is located in its sparsely populated northern and western regions, rooftop installations in those areas are being encouraged to reduce the pressure on power grid operators to build infrastructure. The output of rooftop projects tends to be mostly absorbed locally, with excess output sold to the local power grid if they are grid-connected. Issues troubling financiers and investors include the lack of a guarantee, when a building’s ownership is transferred, of developers’ rights to operate solar farms they have installed. The industry is also lobbying for state-owned power distributors to act as collectors of power tariffs and take the risk of payment delinquencies in exchange for a return from rooftop projects, so that developers can be assured of stable revenues regardless of who owns or occupies the building. Another issue is the lack of insurance products to protect developers from lost power output due to adverse weather and equipment damage caused by accidents.
Solar panel producer plans move to Malaysia
By : fcccadmin
Comtec Solar Systems has decided to move production from China to Malaysia in anticipation of increasing protectionism in the U.S. and European power markets. Chief Executive John Zhang said that staying clear of China’s crowded market served by low-end products was key to long-term survival. Amid increasing overseas trade protectionism, the company has chosen a strategy to gradually move its production away from eastern China to Malaysia. “The United States is highly likely to impose further trade barriers aimed at Chinese producers this year, we can’t just sit here and hope that it won’t happen,” Zhang said. Comtec had been exporting to its American panel-producer customer Sunpower’s Malaysian plant for some time. “We have been considering producing in Malaysia for over a year because we have a major customer there, but now our main consideration for moving there is to avoid trade barriers in our main markets,” he added. The U.S. imposed steep anti-dumping duties on Chinese solar products in 2012. Similar duties are likely to be slapped this year on Taiwan-made products to close a loophole that allows mainland producers to avoid duties by shifting downstream product processing to Taiwan, Zhang said. Shanghai-based and Hong Kong-listed Comtec has production facilities in Shanghai and Jiangsu province, which can annually make around 550 megawatt (MW) of mono-crystalline silicon solar wafers. Comtec plans to start commissioning 300 MW of capacity in Kuching, east Malaysia, this month, and reach full capacity by the year-end. 100 MW of capacity is moved from China with the rest newly acquired. Comtec’s wafer shipment grew 17.3% last year to 397 MW. It posted a net profit of CNY7.1 million in this year’s first-quarter, but suffered net losses of CNY133 million in the whole of last year.
Chinese solar panels have high carbon footprint
By : fcccadmin
The manufacture of Chinese solar panels exported to Europe produces a carbon footprint twice the size of those made in Europe, a U.S. study has found. It says this is because China has fewer environmental and efficiency standards and generates more electricity from coal and other non-renewable sources. The study was conducted by Northwestern University and the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and published in the Solar Energy Journal. “It takes a lot of energy to extract and process solar-grade silicon, and in China that energy tends to come from dirtier and less-efficient energy sources than it does in Europe,” said Seth Darling, a co-author of the report and Argonne scientist. The study analyzed the “embedded” energy in Chinese-made solar panels, from mining of raw materials, the manufacturing process to shipping the finished products. “While it might be an economically attractive option to move solar-panel manufacturing from Europe to China, it is actually less sustainable from the lifecycle energy and environmental perspective,” said You Fengqi, Assistant Professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University and an author of the paper. A Chinese-produced solar panel made from silicon and installed in sunny southern Europe would need to be used for 20% to 30% longer than a European-made panel to produce enough energy to offset the higher carbon emissions of its production. Li Yan, Greenpeace’s East Asia climate and energy campaign manager, said China’s high use of coal for electricity meant its factories were much dirtier than those in most European countries, where renewable and nuclear energy were more common. China is the world’s largest maker of solar panels, accounting for more than 60% of the total, according to data from the China Photovoltaic Industry Alliance. The study’s authors propose a carbon tariff on Chinese solar panels of between €105 and €129 a ton of carbon dioxide to offset the emissions. China did not have specific environmental and energy limits for solar-panel makers until 2010, when the central government moved to curb the blind expansion of the industry. Last year the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) updated the requirements, setting limits on energy consumption and emissions. By the end of the year, 109 companies accounting for 74% of solar panel production met those requirements. A further 74 companies have since met the target.
China remains leading investor in alternative energy
By : fcccadmin
China remained the leading investor in renewable energy in 2013, even as global investment fell sharply, according to the Global Status Report by the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century. China invested more in renewable energy than all of Europe did in 2013. Although the renewables sector continues to offer huge growth potential in China, it also faces some constraints like overcapacity. New investment in renewables fell for the second consecutive year globally in 2013, partly because of uncertainties over incentives in Europe and the United States, as well as sharp reductions in technology costs. Investment from developed countries fell to the lowest level in four years, with Europe’s investment in renewables falling by 44% in 2013 compared to 2012. China’s new investment in renewable energy was USD56.3 billion in 2013, accounting for 61% of developing-country investment in renewables. Lin Boqiang, Director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, said growth was further depressed by the economic slowdown in developed countries and the rapid growth of the previous years. Ten years ago, most of the deployment and manufacturing of renewable energy occurred in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Since then, markets, manufacturing and investment have shifted to other regions, said the report. “China has become the world leader in renewable manufacturing and installed capacity, having increased investment in the sector nearly every year for the past decade,” it said.
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