“It doesn’t make sense for everybody to do everything,” she said at the time; “there’ll be elements of the supply chain where we will be able to do more, and we’ll be good at it, while there will be other parts that don’t add up economically.”
Egan has also flagged strong potential for Australia to excel in silicon refining, which could then be shipped away for conversion into wafers and cells, and then shipped back for the module manufacturing to be done domestically.
The 2023 Trends in Photovoltaic Applications reports reveals that in 2022, Australia ranked 5th in countries for cumulative distributed PV installed capacity (19.59GW) and 9th for distributed PV (2.83GW) – and is one of the few countries where the rooftop solar segment is driving overall market growth.
Globally, the five leading individual countries – China, US, India, Brazil and Spain – represented around 69% of all installations recorded in 2022, while the top 10 markets cover around 81% of the 2022 annual world market, a sign that the growth of the global PV market has been driven by a limited number of countries yet again.