Photovoltaic battery cabinet supply chain model

The supply chain itself considers the production of solar PV's five main components: polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells, and modules. Producing each component requires input from lower-value components; namely, producing modules requires cells, producing cells requires wafers, and so on (as shown in Fig. 1a and Supplementary Fig. 1).

The model covers the global PV supply chain from 2021 to 2030, using weighted multi-objective optimization for total industry costs and job creation (details in Methods: Modeling framework) to analyze the impact and pathways of the supply chain transition.

Conversion factors between segments in PV supply chain, stocks of modules, lead time for manufacturing investment by region and product, and job creation of the manufacturing by product are collected from the Special Report for Solar PV Global Supply Chain from IEA 4.

Because diversification is one of the key strategies for reducing supply chain risks, the report assesses the opportunities and challenges of developing solar PV supply chains in terms of job creation, investment requirements, manufacturing costs, emissions and recycling.

Combined, this future work would help characterize current supply chains and help governments identify the supply chain strategies needed to achieve a fast, low-cost, and resilient low-carbon energy transition. A linear programming optimization model is developed for the solar PV global supply chain analysis.

However, irrespective of European regional goals, China will maintain a predominant role in the solar PV supply chain due to the advantages of manufacturing capacity and costs, and the need to expand global capacity by over 1.5 times.