Magazine Archive 02 - 2025

  Now that 2025 is well underway, it’s becoming clear that solar is in for a challenging year. Grid congestion is an increasingly common barrier to new solar installations as more regions up their share of PV. Solutions in the form of energy storage to support the grid, and power purchase agreements to cut it […]

The Invesco Solar exchange-traded fund (ETF) rounded out 2024 with a double-digit decline in December but all eyes are on 2025 as investors await key decisions from the new US administration. Jesse Pichel, of Roth Capital Partners, explores the latest developments in the US solar market.

Operational electrolyzer capacity surged in China following the introduction of supportive policies, doubling in both 2023 and 2024. China’s nameplate electrolyzer manufacturing capacity reached 39 GW per year in 2024. Announced projects could raise that to more than 50 GW by 2026. Xin You and Siqi He, of S&P Global Commodity Insights, explore the future of Chinese green hydrogen.

InfoLink estimates that demand for solar in Southeast Asia, at 8 GW to 12 GW in 2024, could reach 9 GW to 15 GW in 2025. Analyst Jenny Lin examines power market liberalization and other policy levers driving growth in the region’s four largest markets.

China’s photovoltaic market looks set to continue its battle with overcapacity in 2025. It will do so with a slew of untested industry initiatives and a redoubling of overseas expansion efforts, despite protectionist barriers springing up.

Indian domestic solar cell production capacity is expected to increase more than fourfold to between 43 GW and 47 GW by June 2026, up from 10 GW in March 2024. The production surge has been prompted by the government’s extension of domestic content rules coming into effect on June 1, 2026. Sehul Bhatt, director of market intelligence and analytics at Crisil, examines India’s cell manufacturing ramp-up.

While the world may have added at least 500 GW of solar in 2024, Japan’s PV market is slowing. Izumi Kaizuka, manager of the research division at RTS Corp., explains why the PV consultancy predicts Japan will add 5.5 GW of solar in 2025, down from 6.2 GW in 2024.

The history of the global solar industry has had a pervasive feature: modelers have consistently missed PV’s meteoric rise. Toby D. Couture and David Jacobs, coordinators of the think tank Global Solar PV Brain Trust, report on their latest findings.

Taiwan’s land scarcity poses a challenge to achieving renewable energy goals, making dual-use approaches such as agrivoltaics and fishery-solar arrays critical to deployment. There are a number of obstacles to overcome for that to happen, as Brian Publicover explains.