Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, June 14th (Reporter Wang Lu) The Economic Reference Daily published an article on June 14th titled "The Photovoltaic Industry may Survive in the New Era". The article states that on June 13th, the 17th (2024) International Solar Photovoltaic and Smart Energy (Shanghai) Exhibition (hereinafter referred to as "SNEC Photovoltaic Exhibition") officially opened, reaching a new high in scale. Standing in the exhibition hall, there is a surge of people, foreign faces can be seen everywhere, and companies are competing to showcase new technologies and products.
At this grand event known as the "wind vane" of the photovoltaic industry, changes, innovation, and breakthroughs have become hot topics of discussion. Several industry leaders believe that China's photovoltaic industry is in an important transition period, and the industry may usher in major changes. Revolutionary technological breakthroughs drive innovative allocation of production factors and deep industrial transformation and upgrading to occur simultaneously.
"Meeting again after a year, the photovoltaic industry has undergone two major changes." Zhu Gongshan, President of the Global Green Energy Council and Executive Chairman of the 2024 SNEC PV+International Photovoltaic Conference, expressed his emotions at the Global Photovoltaic Conference on the eve of the SNEC Photovoltaic Exhibition.
Since last year, the photovoltaic industry has been continuously reshaping its pattern in a changing environment. For example, in the field of materials and manufacturing, large bases replace small bases, low energy consumption replaces high energy consumption, and high-end smart manufacturing replaces conventional manufacturing. The once diverse technological route has shifted to N-type technology to unify the world.
"At present, China's photovoltaic industry is in an important transition period of 'breaking through the cocoon and becoming a butterfly'. The industry is not going through the cyclical iteration of the past three to five years, but a rehearsal before the era of major changes in the photovoltaic industry." Zhu Gongshan said, "The current market mismatch feedback does not affect the high growth trend of the industry. Photovoltaic demand will still maintain high growth, but the growth rate will slightly slow down. We need to strengthen our confidence in crossing the cycle."
Behind confidence, innovation is an eternal driving force. In recent years, the photovoltaic industry has ushered in a new round of driving force in technology, management, and carbon chain, giving birth to photovoltaic products with lower costs, higher efficiency, stronger power generation reliability, and more green and low-carbon.
Zhu Gongshan stated that only through breakthroughs in core technologies and further innovation can we bring about the expansion of industry limits and the improvement of the "internal competition" ecosystem. At present, the photovoltaic industry is accelerating the development of new quality productivity, and the revolutionary breakthrough window period of photovoltaic technology is approaching, driving innovative allocation of production factors and deep industrial transformation and upgrading to occur simultaneously.
At the exhibition, multiple global or national debut new products and technologies were unveiled, and enterprises competed with each other to compete. For example, GCL Group has released a blockchain based "GCL Carbon Chain" management platform, which is the world's first photovoltaic carbon chain. It will achieve visualization, quantification, and trustworthiness of the low-carbon footprint of granular silicon module products, reducing production and operating costs. The SiRO carbon chain intelligent component, an on chain product based on GCL's carbon chain, has been officially announced and is expected to deliver its first order in the near future.
The new product launched globally by Aixu Corporation, the "full screen" component, has a maximum power of 700W and a conversion efficiency of over 25%. Longji Green Energy has created differentiated advantages for different scenarios and launched the world's first villa specific photovoltaic module, which uses HPBC to black batteries and can generate up to 450W of power.
Zhang Haimeng, Vice President of Longji Green Energy, stated in an interview with Economic Reference that the conversion efficiency of photovoltaic cells is approaching the limit of 29%, which is just around the corner. There is still a lot of room for improvement in the conversion efficiency of the next-generation perovskite stacking technology, but it will take some time to truly achieve industrialization.
Zhu Gongshan believes that in the context of vigorously developing new quality productivity, the photovoltaic industry has ushered in a new paradigm of technological critical transformation, and one of the important roles is perovskite. In the second half of 2024, with the countdown to the production of related gigawatt level projects, perovskite is about to achieve a critical leap from 0 to 1. Crystal silicon stacked modules are the first step and breakthrough for the commercial use of perovskites, and their efficiency is expected to increase to over 35% to 40% in the future, driving the cost of photovoltaic electricity from affordable to low and then to ultra-low prices.
In the eyes of many industry insiders, with the continuous breakthroughs in technology, the biggest challenge in the development of the photovoltaic industry is no longer cost, but rather the problem of online consumption. The deep integration of photovoltaics into new power systems is one of the trends in future industrial changes.
In the past two years, the development of new energy has further accelerated. As of the end of April 2024, the cumulative installed capacity of wind and photovoltaic power generation in China exceeded 1.1 billion kilowatts, a year-on-year increase of about 38%, and the demand for consumption has significantly increased.
Gao Jifan, Honorary Chairman of the China Photovoltaic Industry Association and Chairman of Trina Solar, stated that the photovoltaic industry is moving towards high-quality development, and the issues of time and space matching between photovoltaics and the power grid need to be solved. In the future, we need to stand at the height of the power grid system to develop integrated solutions for photovoltaic storage and the entire system.
"Photovoltaics will be deeply embedded in the construction of new power systems, forming a new coupling path of power grid interdependence, balanced development of source grid load storage, integration of photovoltaic hydrogen storage, ammonia alcohol storage, and photovoltaic storage charging conversion cloud detection." Zhu Gongshan believes that "photovoltaic power generation+deep peak shaving of ultra supercritical coal-fired units+CCUS carbon capture" can achieve integration of carbon reduction, production increase, strong grid, and stable power. The exploration path for a new energy system of "four new and one strong" can be achieved through the development of a large base for storing hydrogen, ammonia, and alcohol in the desert, sand prevention and control, external transmission through ultra-high pressure channels, and nearby consumption by zero carbon industry.
Source: Xinhua News Agency
