How state-supported scale, delayed market clearing and destructive price competition reshaped the global solar supply chain Solar power has never been cheaper. Solar manufacturing has rarely been less profitable. Both facts lead back to China. Over little more than a decade, China moved from being one participant in the photovoltaic industry to controlling most of the global supply chain. It built enormous capacity in polysilicon, wafers, cells and modules. It lowered production costs, accelerated the commercial adoption of new cell designs and supplied the world with panels at prices many competing manufacturers could not match. That scale helped make solar one of the cheapest sources of new electricity in history. It also created a much harder question. Why did capacity continue to expand after prices collapsed, profits disappeared and much of the industry began losing money? In a normally functioning market, the sequence should be straightforward: Price falls → profitability fa...
Reshaping the Global Economy. Global Markets, Perspectives and Insights.