TrendForce predicts China will lead global solar charge in 2014
EnergyTrend, a research division of TrendForce, is predicting that global PV demand will be around 42GW in 2014, a 17% rise compares to 2013. With China announcing a series of PV and grid-connection policies, the PV demand will increase significantly. Chinese companies have started to shift their focus to the growing domestic market.
"Chinese PV market is likely to be the lead in 2014 or be the first one to reach 10GW PV installations in the world," said Jason Huang, research manager of EnergyTrend.
The Chinese government has been releasing policies to promote the PV industry development since the end of 2013. Policies mainly relate to power generation management, operation, and subsidy. Policies such as "The notice of temporary distributed PV project management regulation", "The temporary PV operation and supervision regulation", and "The notice of liquidating 2012 gold sun and PV building demonstration projects" complete the PV standards having an impact within China. The goal of the policies is to lay a foundation for rapid PV system development in 2014.
China plans to focus on distributed PV systems in 2014. Due to incomplete financial support, development, and auditing processes, EnergyTrend believes that instead of moving toward distributed PV systems right away, China will pay equal attention to utility-scale and distributed PV projects for the time being.
Aside from the Chinese government's subsidies on distributed PV systems, provincial and municipal sectors have proposed subsidy plans to stimulate local development to attract more system developers and investment. Yet, whether subsidy condition and amount is reasonable still needs to be assessed since these types of subsidy policies will be viewed as a way to subsidize local companies, but it may be an obstacle for non-local enterprises.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has also officially announced at the end of 2013 the company list for those deemed to have met "PV manufacturing standard conditions". All first-tier manufacturers, totalling 109 companies, were in the list as expected. Counting each company once, there were 11 polysilicon manufacturers, with the number of silicon brick, ingot, and wafer manufacturers being 16, 14, and 28.. There were also 40 cell manufacturers and 43 module companies.
These companies will receive benefits such as bank loan support and government export tax rebate. The total number of companies may exceed 109 due to vertically integrated companies that are located in China.
Cell and module manufacturers still represented the largest group while the industrial concentration for upstream manufacturers is becoming more obvious. It's believed that the Chinese government will continue to release relevant PV policies that will encourage Chinese PV companies to continue to focus on merger and acquisitions in 2014.
