> Chinese labs are doing a favor to the world. But I can also say with 100% certainty that if US labs were to close shops next year, Chinese labs would immediately start charging $$.
How would do you explain the pricing of Chinese solar panels, after managing to destroy other countries' solar industries? The prices are still dropping per watt.
Could it be China's internal demand for solar is big enough, and its long-term governmental strategy on renewables result in an outcome that almost looks like largesse to the rest of the world? I suspect Chinese AI may follow a similar path.
FYI if you look into what has happened in the wholesale solar market since the end of 2025, this is no longer true. Prices are now 20% higher than they were in Nov/Dec, and were even higher earlier this year. Hard to predict the future but we may have reached a price floor, as at 2025 prices the module suppliers were below cost and losing money. The market dynamics have changed significantly since then
China may well save the world with green energy but I’m skeptical to assume we should just trust them to share their best intelligence with us freely, it’s a totally different think to sharing their best intelligence.
The low prices were below cost and everyone knew it. Modules fell to $0.07–0.09/W through 2024 and early 2025 while Chinese manufacturers took heavy losses to hold share. In H1 2025 alone the top four module makers lost a combined $1.54B. JinkoSolar, LONGi and JA Solar shipped 100GW+ between them and still posted revenue declines of 33%, 15% and 36%. It was a systematic takeover financed by 1) cheap capital, 2) local-government land and tax support, 3) a tolerance for losses that no Western balance sheet can match.
Then the state decided the bleeding should stop, and prices went up. Polysilicon utilization was cut to 55–70% and prices jumped 48% in September 2025 alone. On Dec 25, 2025, LONGi, TCL Zhonghuan, Gokin and Shuangliang jointly raised wafer quotes ~12%. Module prices had already rebounded from CNY 0.6 to ~0.9/W, and 2026 talk is toward CNY 1.00 (~$0.21)/W. Same firms, same factories, same cost curve. Different instruction.
So the structural advantage is completely real. China’s share of every stage — polysilicon, ingot, wafer, cell, module — exceeds 80%, which is more than double its share of global demand. It also hosts all ten of the world’s top PV equipment suppliers. Xinjiang alone is 40% of global polysilicon. One in seven panels worldwide comes out of a single facility. That is the whole belt: raw material, the machines that make the machines, and final assembly, all co-located.
So there are two different things here. The floor is cheap because of clustering, scale and learning curve. The below-floor pricing was strategic, and it has already been switched off now that the competition is gone. Only the first one survives without a policy decision behind it.
Below-cost pricing ends the moment the sponsoring state decides it should.
This comment has been flagged in our software as AI-generated. Of course it could be a false positive (though from reading it myself it does come across as LLM-influenced). But if you've used AI to write or polish the text, even just a little bit, please don't. The guidelines specifically ask us not to do this: https://hackertimes.com/newsguidelines.html#generated
While this has clearly been written by / with help from an LLM, the general info is correct and matches what I have heard from those suppliers (although $0.21/W future pricing is far higher than the estimates I've seen)
Pangram believes this is 100% AI generated. High confidence. If you just used AI to edit your work, then it would say it was human influenced or low confidence, which is contradictory to another comment you claimed.
How would do you explain the pricing of Chinese solar panels, after managing to destroy other countries' solar industries? The prices are still dropping per watt.
Could it be China's internal demand for solar is big enough, and its long-term governmental strategy on renewables result in an outcome that almost looks like largesse to the rest of the world? I suspect Chinese AI may follow a similar path.