Knowledge news
A new study, published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Energy & Environmental Science, identifies which conditions are most important to China’s price advantage in silicon solar panels and assesses whether they can be reproduced elsewhere. The study finds that manufacturing scale and supply-chain advantages are the main driving forces behind China’s 23% price advantage over US competitors. Both these drivers are found to be more important than low-cost labor, whose advantage is offset by higher inflation and country-specific risk adjustments. The study concludes that these main advantages are not unique to China and can be replicated by manufacturers based in other countries if comparable scale can be achieved.