Comparative Global PV Manufacturing Cost and Sustainable Pricing Assessment: China, Southeast Asia, India, USA, and Europe

In the fast-developing photovoltaics (PV) industry, assessing manufacturing costs is a challenging task. Technology developments need to be constantly followed and technology parameters as well as material flows and consumption as well as pricing to be updated accordingly. The authors of this work have been developing detailed bottom-up PV manufacturing cost models for different PV production technologies and stages [1]-[4] and been publishing various cost and technology analyses for more than a decade. However, in the last years reshoring production from market dominating China has gained significant importance to increase market resilience, especially within Europe, USA, and India. These markets pursue different regulative measures and funding schemes to foster the set-up of new production facilities. As PV technology choice still can be a differentiator for manufacturers, the TOPCon and Heterojunction solar cell technology by far dominate the market and with only little technology differentiation. Thus, the choice of technology is having a lower impact on PV manufacturing costs than location of production. The authors have previously been assessing PV manufacturing in different global regions, but the cost analyses’ have shown deviating results [5]-[8]. These can be explained by different underlying technology parameters as well as cost assumptions for the assessed different global regions between the authors at time of the assessment. However, the previous analysis results may leave investors, governments, and policy makers with uncertainty and thus restrained in decision making. In the recent years, the authors have closely been involved in consulting and development of new PV manufacturing facilities around the globe and each gained deeper knowledge on localized cost assessment for PV. Based on this experience, this work is a combined effort of the authors to assess, analyse, and compare PV manufacturing cost and sustainable pricing along the whole PV value chain throughout the stages of polysilicon, ingot & wafer, solar cell, and PV module production for the cases of China, Southeast Asia, India, and Europe. The authors’ work is currently in preliminary stage. The goal is to present a joint analysis with a comparative global PV Manufacturing cost and sustainable pricing assessment for the regions of China, Southeast Asia, India, USA, and Europe. Learnings where the differences in manufacturing cost and pricing for the individual regions are based-on shall be derived, discussed, and challenges addressed. The explanatory pages give a more detailed impression on the planned work.