Posted on May 17, 2023
China dominates the solar power industry. The EU wants to change that
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https://www.npr.org/2023/05/17/ [login to see] /solar-power-eu-germany-china
Bright yellow robotic arms appear to be waving and then saluting as they pick up silicon solar cells and gently affix them to glass panels at the Heckert Solar assembly floor in Chemnitz, a German city near the Czech border.
Employee Sascha Hahn watches quietly at the end of the assembly line, arms crossed, as his colleagues place finished solar panels into boxes labeled "made in Germany."
He says they make 3,000 panels daily, and 20,000 panels in a week, but it's not enough. "The market wants more."
In Europe, energy is suddenly hard to come by. Russia's invasion of Ukraine forced most European countries such as Germany to do away with its massive supply of imported Russian natural gas, and they're now looking to alternatives like solar power.
Bright yellow robotic arms appear to be waving and then saluting as they pick up silicon solar cells and gently affix them to glass panels at the Heckert Solar assembly floor in Chemnitz, a German city near the Czech border.
Employee Sascha Hahn watches quietly at the end of the assembly line, arms crossed, as his colleagues place finished solar panels into boxes labeled "made in Germany."
He says they make 3,000 panels daily, and 20,000 panels in a week, but it's not enough. "The market wants more."
In Europe, energy is suddenly hard to come by. Russia's invasion of Ukraine forced most European countries such as Germany to do away with its massive supply of imported Russian natural gas, and they're now looking to alternatives like solar power.
China dominates the solar power industry. The EU wants to change that
Posted from npr.org
China
Energy
European Union
Europe
Germany
Posted 12 mo ago
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PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
...""Our industry requires massive scale in order to become super competitive against Asian rivals and in particular Chinese companies," says Erfurt. "So I believe it could be a double strike if the EU would also put packages together for temporary state aid, helping to put fertilizer in the industry to help it growing."
But Erfurt says the biggest challenge is time. He says it's taking the EU parliament too long to pass a bill that would generate clean tech investment. That's part of the reason that Meyer Burger has decided to build its next big solar panel plant not in the EU, but in Arizona, to take advantage of tax credits in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act.
Back on the solar panel assembly line in Chemnitz, Heckert Solar's Uwe Krautwurst is also hoping that both the EU and Germany act fast on helping resurrect his country's solar industry. He says an ongoing Chinese monopoly of the world's solar panels is dangerous. "One danger is that you have no industry here and no further research and no further developments here in the European Union," he says.
And that, he says, would be a sad ending for a country that helped spur growth in the solar power industry in the first place."
...""Our industry requires massive scale in order to become super competitive against Asian rivals and in particular Chinese companies," says Erfurt. "So I believe it could be a double strike if the EU would also put packages together for temporary state aid, helping to put fertilizer in the industry to help it growing."
But Erfurt says the biggest challenge is time. He says it's taking the EU parliament too long to pass a bill that would generate clean tech investment. That's part of the reason that Meyer Burger has decided to build its next big solar panel plant not in the EU, but in Arizona, to take advantage of tax credits in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act.
Back on the solar panel assembly line in Chemnitz, Heckert Solar's Uwe Krautwurst is also hoping that both the EU and Germany act fast on helping resurrect his country's solar industry. He says an ongoing Chinese monopoly of the world's solar panels is dangerous. "One danger is that you have no industry here and no further research and no further developments here in the European Union," he says.
And that, he says, would be a sad ending for a country that helped spur growth in the solar power industry in the first place."
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