Energy Systems

China’s Solar Panel Production to Double by 2017

by J. Matthew Roney, Earth Policy Institute

China installed a world record amount of solar photovoltaics (PV) capacity in 2013. While this was the first time the country was the number one installer, China has led all countries in making PV for the better part of a decade. China now accounts for 64 percent of global solar panel production — churning out 25,600 megawatts of the nearly 40,000 megawatts of PV made worldwide in 2013 — according to data from GTM Research.

Five of the top 10 solar panel manufacturing firms in 2013 — including Yingli at the top and runner-up Trina — were Chinese companies. Coming in third was Canadian Solar, which produces 90 percent of its modules in China. Two Japanese companies and one each from the United States and Germany rounded out the top 10. (See Excel data.)

As demand for increasingly affordable solar power continues to climb around the world, GTM Research projects that China’s annual solar panel output will double to 51,000 megawatts by 2017, representing close to 70 percent of global production at that time. Beijing no doubt had such a quick industry ramp-up in mind when in May 2014 it announced a new national PV capacity goal: 70,000 megawatts of installed PV by 2017, up from 18,300 megawatts at the end of 2013. To put that in perspective, if it meets that goal China will add more solar electricity-generating capacity in four years than the entire world had in place in early 2011.

3 Comments

  1. While I put these articles up so we can keep tabs on what’s happening in ‘green technology’, I trust our astute readers will put it into context – i.e. that mining minerals to create solar panels (and polluting water courses and creating ‘cancer villages’ in the process), and to slap them onto our best farmland (i.e. land with the best aspect), is never going to be ideal – at least not if such rollouts aren’t in tandem with the rollout of a steady state economy with a very different view of what is important in life….

    One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely. This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy…. This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity; it is moral ignorance and weakness of character. We don’t know how to use energy, or what to use it for. And we cannot restrain ourselves. Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy. Nuclear power, if we are to believe its advocates, is presumably going to be well used by the same mentality that has egregiously devalued and misapplied man- and womanpower. If we had an unlimited supply of solar or wind power, we would use that destructively, too, for the same reason.

    Perhaps all of those sources of energy are going to be developed. Perhaps all of them can sooner or later be developed without threatening our survival. But not all of them together can guarantee our survival, and they cannot define what is desirable. – Wendell Berry, The Agricultural Crisis, A Crisis of Culture. p. 16, 17

  2. I’d be curious to know how much energy it took to manufacture and install all those panels ie what is the net energy benefit, not just the total power generating capacity?

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