File this under good news masquerading as bad. According to Bloomberg, the solar industry is about to run out of panels for the first time since 2006.
But pay no attention to the alarmist headline. The good news is that the shortage has little in the way of legs.
For one, Bloomberg didn’t actually cite any study or research confirming its hypothesis, and even admitted that several companies have accelerated manufacturing on their minds. As I reported in June, U.S. installation leader SolarCity acquired manufacturer Silevo specifically to build “one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world” in the United States. That’s far indeed from the Chinese manufacturers like Trina and Yingli that Bloomberg cites as winners in the coming artificial solar scarcity. (Rooftop solar advocates are the losers, it adds, because they don’t buy enough). [Disclosure: SolarCity is an installer-partner of SolarEnergy’s parent company, PURE Energies.]
But of course, SolarCity isn’t alone: Its main competitor SunPower may be running its factories at full tilt now, but its new 350mw Fab4 factory goes online in the Philippines next year, while its 700mw Fab5 factory arrives in 2017. The domestic front is looking bright indeed.
Meanwhile, overseas production is ramping up as well. Ontario-based Canadian Solar, which deals primarily in Asia, began construction on a new 300mw Chinese factory in May. In fact, “new solar cell factories were expected to come online during the second half of 2014, especially in Taiwan,” explained NPD Solarbuzz vice president Finlay Colville. Except that “the threat of import duties on Chinese and Taiwanese manufactured components shipping to Europe or the United States, however, has caused additional delays and uncertainty.”
Which is, in the end, the unwritten argument in Bloomberg‘s analysis, which is stock-picking rather than getting to the bottom of the shortfall, which is where the solar war between America and China resides. Unnecessary political and economic uncertainty about who is going to pay what to solarize the world is what is truly engineering the so-called panel shortage that hasn’t yet occurred. Because of that childish tit-for-tat, production and manufacturing are going to stumble in the short term, until the nonsense is resolved and we all get back to the business at hand, which is putting a solar panel on top of everything, everywhere.
But even the tariff war isn’t going to stop solar’s runaway train, for one simple reason: It is humanity’s chief cleantech alternative, as coal, gas and methane booms come to bust. There is so much money to be made in the building and selling of solar panels that no business with any sense (or cents) is going to sit by and tolerate artificial scarcity games, when global warming is breathing down our necks.
We may never see a solar glut again, but a shortage is just as improbable.
This article appeared at Solar Energy