The manufacture of clean energy goods and provision of clean energy services, vital to climate change mitigation efforts, increasingly takes place through globally dispersed supply chains. In these supply chains, parts and components often cross borders multiple times before feeding into a clean energy power plant that is set up with the help of foreign or domestic firms that provide services such as design, engineering and construction as well as operations and maintenance. Non-tariff measures such as standards have the potential to impact trade much more than tariffs and nowhere is this truer than for solar-photovoltaic (PV). Policymakers in the trade as well as energy spheres thus need to be aware of the type of standards that are being set along various segments of the value chain for solar-PV for both goods and services as well as the standards development organisations that are involved.
This paper maps the state of play of development of certain critical standards along important segments of the solar-PV energy value chain, identifying the major standard-setting organisations involved and exploring implications from a trade and trade rules perspective. It further puts forward a set of recommendations intended to help make the global diffusion of solar-PV products and services as seamless as possible.