SHOCK SOLAR WAIT TIMES
Despite a huge customer demand, international supply problems are powering lengthy manufacture times. Now there are calls for investment in the industry closer to home
SOARING home power costs are prompting more Aussies to consider home solar, turbocharging our already world-leading demand, but new buyers are waiting up to ten months for installation.
According to the Clean Energy Council, an astonishing 25 per cent of Australian houses sport the big glass oblongs on their roof: the highest on a per capita basis anywhere in the world.
In Queensland and South Australia the proportion is more than 40 per cent.
“2021 was another record year for clean energy in Australia,” Clean Energy Council chief executive Kane Thornton said.
“The rooftop solar sector had its fifth-straight record-breaking year, installing almost 400,000 new systems, to add 3.3 gigawatts of new capacity.”
Tindo Solar CEO Shayne Jaenisch said inquiries about rooftop solar were up 60 per cent last month, but wait times could vary dramatically depending on the unit needed.
“Because we’re a manufacturer we’ve always got stock; I carry about 15,000 modules in my warehouse,” Mr Jaenisch said.
“But with the silicon chip shortage at the moment there’s a massive delay with a lot of different types of inverters.
“If we have the inverters in stock I can take a deposit today and have it installed in five days.
“Having said that, I sold systems in September I still can’t install because I’m waiting for key components.”
Tindo is Australia’s only locallybased manufacturer of photovoltaic [PV] solar panels, but as with most suppliers the world over, they rely on China for many materials.
The International Energy Association raised concerns about China’s dominance of PV supply chains in a report this month.
It said Beijing already controlled more than 80 per cent of it, and that share was actually set to increase unless other nations developed their own manufacturing capacity.
Professor Renate Egan from the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at the University of NSW said it was an “internationally recognised challenge”.
“We’re not the only place in the world thinking about this. Europe has big activity around local manufacturing, so does the US, so I actually think we’ll wind up with a robust international supply chain, drawing from wherever is the most cost effective place to supply the material, and where makes the right sense in terms of logistics,” Prof Egan said.
She said she thought Australia was best placed to develop capacity in the silicon refining part of the PV manufacturing process.
“Ideally we would do the silicon refining and ship it offshore; someone else would do the wafering and cell processing and then we would take it back and do module processing,” she said.
The IEA report on PV supply chains didn’t mention one of the key concerns with China’s dominance of the industry.
According to research by Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, Beijing has long relied on forced labour from Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province for the construction of its solar panels.
But it’s definitely an issue customers raised, Mr Jaenisch said.