Can Europe recapture the solar PV market from China?
Pamela Largue spoke to Javier Sanz Rodriguez, Thematic Leader Renewable Energies at InnoEnergy, about whether Europe can compete with China’s solar PV market and if so, what strategies would be the most advantageous.
As China continues to dominate the solar PV manufacturing space, Europe is under increasing pressure to maintain a competitive edge.
China’s success and industrial prowess are the result of several factors, explains Sanz, one of the most critical being the timing of its ambitous expansion of manufacturing capabilities, which happened to coincide with the collapse of Europe’s market.
“A contributing factor is that Europe’s solar PV market has simultaneously collapsed, after the initial golden age between 2008 and 2012. However, the market is now falling because of different policies, different changes on the demand side.
“And this happened as China wisely decided to master the production side.”
In Europe, the market only started to surge after 2020, with the updated national energy and climate plans and the EU Green Deal, which according to Sanz, provided a new vision for Europe.
“Europe realised it needed the energy transition and needed to reshape the economy to achieve the energy transition. That was the moment when we started to see the race in the market again.”
COVID-19 highlighted countries’ reliance on China, among others in terms of energy dependence.
“People started to think about where else we are depending on other countries, like energy.
“This was again confirmed during the Ukraine war, highlighting dependence on Russian gas. We also realised the dependency on China for PV, batteries, and many critical raw materials.”
According to Sanz, another factor which reignited Europe’s solar PV market was what he refers to as “the evolution of the mainstream technology”. This meant that new investors and incumbents invested and levelled the competition.
Ultimately, this market growth led to the launch of the European Solar Industry Alliance in 2021, which aimed to enable European industry growth and reshore some capacity. The alliance aims to accelerate solar PV deployment in the EU by scaling up to 30GW of annual solar PV manufacturing capacity in Europe by 2025, facilitating investment, de-risking the sector, and supporting Europe’s decarbonisation.