The Solar-Powered Future Is Being Assembled in China

On a recent morning in central China, workers in blue jumpsuits and white masks placed clamps around a bar of shiny metal and fed it into a powerful cutting machine. The bar was an ingot made of polysilicon, a heavily refined cousin of the same material that makes up sand. Inside the cutter, it was sliced into thousands of small squares slightly larger than a CD case and thinner than a thumbnail. These wafers would then be shipped on to other factories to be infused with conductive elements such as phosphorous and boron, then wired into cells and assembled into panels—the base unit of solar energy generation.

The owner of this factory, Longi Green Energy Technology Co., is the world’s largest producer of solar wafers and the world’s largest solar company by market value. As of the end of last year it created about 1 of every 4 wafers made anywhere on the planet, and since then it’s announced at least five projects to expand its factories or build new ones. Despite a pandemic that may slow the growth of new solar power installations for the first time in decades, Longi expects its production capacity by the end of 2020 to have increased by two-thirds compared with 2019.

Longi and the other Chinese companies that dominate solar—collectively they control at least 60% of global capacity for every step in the supply chain—are playing a risky game. The short history of the solar industry is a tale of repeated boom and bust, with abrupt technological and policy developments rendering multibillion-dollar investments obsolete. Industry leaders one day have, again and again, become bankruptcy filers the next.

The bet in China is that this time is different. Plunging costs have left solar the cheapest form of energy in parts of the world. Subsidies are disappearing as it becomes more competitive with other forms of electric generation, making demand less dependent on political decisions. And advances in energy storage are opening a tantalizing possibility: that solar could, in the near future, replace fossil fuels in many places. “We believe the solar market will maintain the trend of rapid growth,” says Li Zhenguo, Longi’s billionaire president. A physicist by training, he founded the company in 2000, naming it for a university principal who’d impressed Li with his academic rigor. “Current global production capacity, including Longi’s, is nowhere near enough to meet the coming demand.”

Chinese Companies’ Share of Global Solar Equipment Production

Source: BloombergNEF

Longi dates to a time when Chinese solar manufacturers were relying primarily on cheap labor to undercut more established players from the U.S. and Europe. That strategy can collapse once wages rise, as they have in China. But, in Li’s telling, Longi was focused on coming up with a product that could compete in the longer term.

That aim led the company to make a momentous choice early on. There are two ways to make the blocks that solar wafers are sliced from: by cooling molten silicon into one homogeneous structure or encouraging it to crystallize from different points. The first approach, known as mono-crystalline, provides greater conductivity and efficiency. But it’s more expensive than multi-crystalline products, which most manufacturers favored in their efforts to compete with cheap fossil fuel generation.

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