Solar price drop curbs; Carbon emissions trading to spur solar demand

TAIWAN: The carbon emissions trading system has been widely discussed in the past, but for a number of reasons, the idea has not been received well. Recently, greater reception in several parts of the world have begun: with Europe’s rather mature trading platform and market, the Australia government’s recently passed the Clean Energy Act, planning to enforce the carbon emissions trading system starting 2015.

Moreover, China also announced its carbon emissions trading pilot scheme. Consequently, the tradition coal power industry’s generation will decrease as the popularization of the carbon emissions trading system increases, which will benefit the industries of assorted clean energies including solar energy.Source: EnergyTrend, Taiwan.

EnergyTrend, a research division of TrendForce, believes that the underperformance of the global solar industry is mainly due to drastic overexpansion of the global solar capacity. Reducing PV capacity will revive the weak demand, but to what degree remains to be seen.

As for this week’s spot prices, polysilicon, Si wafer, and solar cell price all remain on a downtrend. However, except for the polysilicon price, the prices in the PV supply chain started to alleviate. Lowest polysilicon price was $23/kg, while ASP fell to $25.85/kg, a decrease of 8.33 percent.

In terms of Si wafers, lowest multi-Si wafer price remained at $1.1/piece, while the mono-Si wafer price was $1.6/piece. This week’s multi-Si wafer ASP dipped 1 percent to $1.183/piece; mono-Si wafer ASP fell to $1.65/piece, a decrease of 2.19 percent. The weakening downtrend met the price trend EnergyTrend’s prediction from last week.

The lowest solar cell price was $0.45/Watt, while ASP fell to $0.519/Watt, a 0.95 percent decrease. In terms of module, PV module ASP fell by 1.18 percent to $0.924/Watt. The thin film ASP decreased as well, by 0.47 percent to $0.852.