Driven by technological advancements and significant cost reduction efforts, solar PV market grew exponentially in the year 2024 reaching 599 GW DC in annual instllations, despite overcapacity concerns and power prices coming down in Europe. The question is can it keep up the momentum in 2025 as well? To discuss this question, TaiyangNews Managing Director Michael Schmela recently engaged in an insightful discussion with leading industry stakeholders, Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s (BloombergNEF) Lead Solar Analyst Jenny Chase, JA Solar’s European Region President Henning Schulze, and Global Solar Council CEO Sonia Dunlop. The occasion was the TaiyangNews Webinar on Solar Market 2024 Review & Outlook 2025 on January 22, 2025. When asked by Schmela to rate the year 2024 on a scale of 10 for the global PV industry, Jenny Chase gave it full rating as she believed from the perspective of energy transition, it was a good year as a lot of solar got deployed. It contributed to reducing fossil fuel burn, particularly in Europe and Pakistan, among other places. On the other hand, from the industry perspective Henning Schulze scored it a 6 citing very fierce competition, and the focus this brought on the patents debate. This was a defining year, according to him since the overcapacity and the resultant squeezing of margins for the companies. He stressed that this will be a good thing in the long run as it will lead to a more structured industry since some players may be forced out of the market, which is also ‘very important’. For Sonia Dunlop, the year 2024 was a 7 on the scale characterized by high year-on-year growth, but the challenges in terms of policy and geopolitics continue to remain tricky. A solid growth requires a strong narrative going forward which she said, needs a lot more work. The speakers also reflected on the positives and negatives for the last year with Chase listing South Africa as a surprise element in 2024. This PV market slowed down in terms of installations last year as there were fewer blackouts compared to in 2023 which was a boom year. This, she explained, shows the impact of market conditions on solar. For Schulze, it was a positive that the European Union (EU) did not go for trade measures against Chinese cells and modules as a strategic measure for the industry’s growth. On the other hand, for Dunlop Brazil imposing 25% tariffs on imported solar modules was a negative surprise that she attributed to political forces conspiring to lead to that. The positive, she quipped, was to see big investors from all over the globe, from London and New York to Tokyo starting to shift to PV. Going forward, the trio agreed that even though the industry forecasts are conservative as of now (as they see the market not growing exponentially till 2030), there may be individual market surprises like Pakistan last year that may tilt the annual installation forecasts to a higher range.
