Sustainability Report - Bank Sarasin-Alpen

Solar Energy 2005
Solar cells
Overview of PV cell production 2004
Review of solar cell production
Module prices rising
The big PV cell production
countries: Japan, Germany
and the US
Global production in 2004 was between 60% and 67% higher than in the previous
year, depending on the data sources used. In last year’s report we predicted
global cell production of 1,125 MW for 2004. According to published figures, the
volume was 1,195 MW 1 or 1,256 MW 2 (basis 2003: 750 MW). Apparently growth
rates would have been even higher if producers had had even more raw materials
available. Since 1995 annual growth rates for solar cell production have
therefore averaged more than 35%, with photovoltaics comfortably beating the
growth rates of other renewable energies such as wind power.
There have been no further price cuts, due to the growing shortage of solargrade
silicon and the resulting bottlenecks in PV modules. Instead PV module
prices have risen steadily over the last 14 months since June 2004. The increase
was roughly 5% in the US and over 2% in Europe. This brought the average
module prices of USD 5.22 per watt in America and EUR 5.75 per watt 3 in
Europe to a level last seen in July 2003. At the moment, therefore, higher silicon
prices can be passed on down the entire value chain. In the mid-term, however,
prices should fall back into line with the annual 5% degression in the tariffs for
renewable energy fed into the mains electricity grid.
According to the latest figures from IEA PVPS 4 , global solar cell production in
PVPS countries alone jumped from 686 MW in 2003 to 1,109 MW in 2004,
equivalent to growth of 62%. Production increased more than the average in Japan
(+ 65% to 604 MW) and Europe (+71% to 329 MW), while production in the
US “only” increased 35% to 138 MW (see Fig. 5).
Solar cell production in non-PVPS countries
Production in non-PVPS
countries shows high
percentage increases
China an important market and
producer in PV business
-> Suntech Power
-> Baoding Yingli
According to IEA-PVPS, non-PVPS countries produced cells with a capacity of
around 124 MW in 2004, an increase of 60 MW, or 93%, compared with 2003.
This is a much higher growth rate than in PVPS countries. The figure of 124 MW
now corresponds to roughly 10% of total global cell production of 1,233 MW.
The top country is China. The bulk of the Chinese solar industry consists of PV
module producers, i.e. the part of the value chain that requires the least amount
of know-how. Because labour is so cheap in China, solar modules can be built
here more cheaply than anywhere else in the world. But China is also catching
up in the area of actual cell production. Last year national cell production capacities
climbed to 50 MW and production ran at 35 MW. Targets for the current year
are additional production capacities of 100 MW for crystalline silicon cells and
240 MW for modules. Chinese PV module producers thus require substantial
quantities of imported cells. Acquiring sufficient cell material will therefore be a
major challenge for module producers. The supply of cells will in turn be
1
2
3
4
Paul Maycock, PV Energy Systems, March 2005, www.pvenergy.com
Photon, April 2005
www.solarbuzz.com/moduleprices: Solar module index excluding VAT
Trends in Photovoltaic Applications; Survey Report of selected IEA countries between 1992 and 2004.
IEA Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme – Task 1; September 2005. All subsequent IEA-PVPS references
refer to this publication. www.iea-pvps.org
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