Why Chinese solar giant Longi’s record-breaking panels will take years to bring down electricity bills

Name: Qatar opens first solar power plant built with Chinese equipment and technology
Uploaded: 2022-11-25T01:30:15.000Z
Duration: 1 min 13 s
Description: Qatar opens first solar power plant built with Chinese equipment and technology

The world’s largest producer of solar panels made headlines last week with a new world record for a product’s energy conversion efficiency

But it will take a while for this achievement to translate to cheaper electricity bills and bolster global climate change efforts, analysts say

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Workers at a Longi solar plant in Xixian New Area, northwest China’s Shaanxi Province. Photo: Xinhua

Eric Ng

Published: 9:30am, 25 Nov 2022Updated: 9:06am, 28 Nov 2022

Longi Green Energy Technology, the world’s largest producer of solar panels, made headlines last week by announcing it has broken another world record for a product’s energy conversion efficiency.

While the news is exciting for scientists and engineers, it will take years for this achievement to translate to cheaper electricity bills for consumers and bolster global efforts to decarbonise energy production and fight climate change, analysts said.

“[It] is really a great achievement, bringing the progress in the industry to the next level,” said Karl Melkonyan, senior solar and clean energy technology analyst at financial information provider S&P Global. “The next notable factor, however, is to stabilise the production cost at a level [viable] for [commercialisation].”

Though Longi is able to produce solar cells using a single production line with a capacity of several hundred megawatts, it will take one or two years to scale up production and reduce costs, he said. A solar panel is an assembly of solar cells mounted in a frame.

The Heterojunction technology (HJT) behind the groundbreaking efficiency needs to be cost competitive against the dominant passivated emitter and rear contact (PERC) and the emerging tunnel oxide passivated contacts (TOPCon) technologies, said Melkonyan.

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Qatar opens first solar power plant built with Chinese equipment and technology

Renewable energy – mainly solar and wind – will meet over 70 per cent of China’s additional electricity demand in the next three years as the nation aims for peak coal consumption by 2025 and peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 to help fight global warming, according to the International Energy Agency.

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