How big will the future PV market be? The development of the photovoltaic industry

According to a report released by the United Nations Renewable Energy Agency, the cost of photovoltaic power generation has fallen by 70% in the past seven years. With the advancement of technology, the world has witnessed explosive growth. Last year, China's photovoltaic industry also ushered in the best development opportunities in the past ten years. The newly installed capacity in the country exceeded 50GW for the first time, and the “13th Five-Year Plan” goal was completed ahead of schedule. The development situation is good. Imagine the future, the development trend of the photovoltaic industry and bottlenecks in development, and become a hot spot in the industry.

The picture above shows the Longji 15MW photovoltaic poverty alleviation power station project in Yanchuan County, Shaanxi Province.

1000GW, 1 billion kilowatts. This is the installed capacity of the global photovoltaic power generation installed in the next 5-7 years at the China (Xi'an) Photovoltaic Hard Technology Innovation Summit held recently.

Compared to the current scale of just over 200 million kilowatts, 1 billion kilowatts means a nearly five-fold increase. However, in the view of Li Junfeng, chairman of the China Energy Research Association's Renewable Energy Professional Committee, this scale is still far from enough, not only unable to meet global demand, even China's development goals are not up to.

“Everyone can see that the PV industry is very interesting because we are talking about the global market in name, but in fact, the global market is mainly the Chinese market, or the Asian market. The installed capacity of photovoltaics in Asian countries is global in 2016. Half, the current data is 2/3, of which 50% are in China. We can clearly see that the main force of solar energy development is China.” Michael Schemla, senior consultant of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, said at the meeting.

According to data from CCID, China's polysilicon production in 2017 was 238,000 tons, up 22.6% year-on-year, accounting for 59% of global production; wafer, cell and module production were 85, 71 and 66GW, respectively, accounting for global production. 85%, 63% and 68%; the production scale of more than 5 companies in all links of the industry chain ranks in the top ten in the world. Judging from the installed capacity of power stations, China's new PV installed capacity reached 53 million kilowatts last year, ranking first in the world for five consecutive years, and replacing thermal power for the first time in China, becoming the largest installed power source in the year. As of the end of last year, China's cumulative installed capacity exceeded 130 million kilowatts, and completed the "13th Five-Year Plan" goal ahead of schedule.

Yan Zheyi, deputy chief engineer of the State Grid Corporation's dispatch control center, revealed more positive information at the meeting. According to him, distributed photovoltaics will also complete the “13th Five-Year Plan” target ahead of schedule: “As of the end of December last year, China’s distributed PV installed capacity was 19.44 million kilowatts, a year-on-year increase of 3.7 times. If it continues to grow at this rate, 2019 The photovoltaic industry is likely to complete the 60 million kilowatt distributed target of the '13th Five-Year Plan."

Zhai Zheyi also said that “'13th Five-Year' photovoltaic power generation will still develop rapidly, and internationally. The photovoltaic industry has a strong development momentum.”

In the view of Li Zhenguo, president of Longji Green Energy Technology Co., Ltd., the rapid development of China's photovoltaic industry is due to the continuous reduction of the cost of the photovoltaic power generation industry. “This has made PV's competitiveness in traditional energy sources stronger, so the development of the PV market has reached 100 million kilowatts in 2017 from the market scale of 100,000 kilowatts in the beginning of this century.”

According to Li Zhenguo, in recent years, the technology of the photovoltaic industry has continued to improve, the cost has been declining, and the efficiency has been continuously improved. In the past decade or so, the cost of photovoltaic power generation systems has been reduced from $10/watt to $1/watt, a drop of 90%. Among them, the market price of monocrystalline silicon wafers per watt a decade ago was 100 yuan, but has recently dropped to 4.55 yuan, less than 5% a decade ago. The cost of electricity has dropped from $1/kWh to below $0.10/kWh. In recent years, there have been several power stations below 3 cents/degree in the Middle East and South America.

However, Xie Xiaoping, the chairman of Guodian Investment in the upper reaches of the Yellow River, pointed out that the main problem in China's PV development is the cost problem: “So far, the PV industry needs subsidies, and the industries that need subsidies are actually unsustainable. Therefore, PV Achieving affordable Internet access as early as possible is the key to the healthy development of the industry."

Li Zhenguo said that although China's PV industry is currently pursuing cheap Internet access, PV has become the cheapest clean energy in the world. It is just around the corner: "The development of energy storage industry is not as fast as PV, but if you look forward to the next decade, energy storage costs are likely to fall. The current one-third. Therefore, I believe that the economics of 'photovoltaic + energy storage' will be realized within ten years."

Is 1 billion kilowatts enough?

“Our speculation is that the global PV installation will reach 1000 GW in the next 5-7 years. This scale is equivalent to the capacity of all current thermal power installations in China and half of the world's thermal power installations. Considering the life of photovoltaic power plants for 20-30 years. Cycle, the future PV market will add thousands of GW every year, and become a sustainable development industry, the prospects are extremely broad." Li Zhenguo said.

Michael Schemla also expects the market to continue to grow in the next five years. “Only 1% of electricity in China comes from solar energy, and in many European countries this percentage is as high as 5%-6%. So there is still much room for improvement in China's PV industry.”

For Li Zhenguo's 1000GW development goal, Li Junfeng directly commented: "This scale is too conservative, not enough." He said that the National Development and Reform Commission and the National Energy Administration released the "Energy Production and Consumption Revolution Strategy" last year (2016- 2030), which clarifies that non-fossil energy will account for 15% by 2020, 20% by 2030, and over 50% by 2050. "Currently, nuclear power development has encountered unprecedented difficulties. Hydropower and wind power have been exhausted, and subversive changes are impossible. All countries in the world face the same problem. Therefore, photovoltaics will be highly anticipated."

Li Junfeng calculated an account: China's initial idea in 2030 is to consume 8,000 kWh of electricity per capita. According to the calculation of 1.4 billion people, it will consume 10.2 trillion kWh per year. Last year, photovoltaic power generation was 110 billion kWh, equivalent to 1% of the national power generation. If the proportion of photovoltaic power generation reaches 10%, that is, 1.1 trillion kWh. According to the current efficiency, photovoltaics need at least 800 million kilowatts to complete this goal. Therefore, 1 billion kilowatts should not be a global goal, and even China’s goals cannot be achieved. If PV will achieve about 1.5 trillion kWh by 2030, then it will need 1.2 billion kW.

“Therefore, from the perspective of scale, PV has a long way to go.” Li Junfeng said, “There are 12 years left in 2030, and we need to install 800 million kilowatts. After that, we will add at least 50 million kilowatts per year. Therefore, we should not reduce the scale. , but should increase moderately."

In addition, Li Junfeng believes that PV is already at a stage of slow cost reduction, and the space for technological breakthroughs in driving cost reduction is very limited. The reason why a number of foreign projects can achieve a power cost of 3 cents is not mainly relying on technological advances in hardware, but on “soft” policies. "So, the 'hard' technology needs to be improved, and the 'soft' policy must keep up. As the industry continues to develop on a large scale, the role of the 'soft' policy will become more and more obvious."

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