How can subsidies help a solar PV industry in Europe?

In Europe, supporting local solar PV manufacturing through subsidies or investment can improve competitiveness, create jobs, and increase self-reliance. Compared to trade barriers on China, subsidies can cut industry expenses by 23.6%, create jobs 27.5% more cost-efficiently, and provide a similar gain in self-sufficiency.

How do subsidies affect solar PV production?

Subsidies for producers are conducive to increasing the self-sufficiency in module production by shifting some costs from companies to the government. In Europe, supporting local solar PV manufacturing through subsidies or investment can improve competitiveness, create jobs, and increase self-reliance.

What role will China play in the solar PV supply chain?

However, irrespective of European regional goals, China will maintain a predominant role in the solar PV supply chain due to the advantages of manufacturing capacity and costs, and the need to expand global capacity by over 1.5 times.

What are conversion factors in solar PV supply chain?

Conversion factors between segments in PV supply chain, stocks of modules, lead time for manufacturing investment by region and product, and job creation of the manufacturing by product are collected from the Special Report for Solar PV Global Supply Chain from IEA 4.

Can Europe regain a missed opportunity with a solar PV supply chain?

Building up the solar PV supply chain can also be seen as a chance for Europe to regain a missed opportunity: the initial wave of solar PV adoption was led by European demand and, for a time, Germany's manufacturing was a competitive supplier 4.

What is a solar PV supply chain?

The supply chain itself considers the production of solar PV’s five main components: polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules. Producing each component requires input from lower-value components; namely, producing modules requires cells, producing cells requires wafers, and so on (as shown in Fig. 1a and Supplementary Fig. 1).