The job cuts illustrate the pain from the vicious price wars being fought across Chinese industries, including solar and electric vehicles, as they grapple with overcapacity and tepid demand. The world produces twice as many solar panels each year as it uses, with most of them manufactured in China…
“The industry has been facing a downturn since the end of 2023,” said Cheng Wang, an analyst at Morningstar. “In 2024, it actually got worse. In 2025, it looks like it’s getting even worse.”
Battery packs probably won’t be affected. Whether marine batteries, or PowerWalls (i.e. lead-acid or lithium), solar panel prices likely won’t have much effect.
But might not hurt to watch panel pricing. Will there be sales because of less demand? Or a price hike because of less supply? I have no idea.
I wouldn’t mind some additional panels. Of course, we would have to factor in the expense of professional installation. I’m not going to DIY that one. Punching holes in my roof for mounting brackets needs to be done by roofers who know how to seal-up the holes properly.
I’m remembering the vast overbuild of fiber and telecommunications infrastructure in the 1990’s run up to the dot com bust, and it turns out that it’s all been used and more. Maybe the overproduction and dumping of panels will turn out to be a good thing. I can think of worse mistakes.
Maybe solar panels are a make work project, like DoD procurement, or the forever war in “1984”? Keep the Proles busy building panels, so their thoughts don’t turn to revolution.
I read somewhere it took 68 years from the time solar PV was invented until one terawatt of capacity was installed (2022). It took two years for the next terawatt. Next terawatt will probably happen this year or early next.
One gripe I’ve been hearing for years is that China is burning all this coal, so any attempt for the US to transition away from fossil fuels is futile and just a leftist plot to destroy the economy.*
Welp, turns out in Q1 2025 Chinese carbon emissions decreased by 1.6% YoY, beating the Paris according 2030 targets handily. This is not due to economic slow down. It is because an enormous amount of carbon free energy has come online, along with huge adoption of BEV and hybrid vehicles.
*I’m not joking. Rush Limbaugh and others have stated this many times. I’ve even read similar sentiments on this board.
In 1957 the US produced 6.5M cars. in 1958 that dropped to 4.8M. Economies do that some times. Despite this apparent oversupply the US car industry did okay in the subsequent years. I suspect the same will happen with solar energy, which is still maturing much like the auto industry in the 1950s..
Global Crossing was one of the victims – bankrupt. Users certainly did benefit. In another thread I mentioned Global Crossing as an investment that didn’t bounce back but one hard to predict because business was good but prices dropped too fast.
Too much of a good thing might not be too good after all.
