At Greentech Media, we report on numbers all year long, from market size figures in cleantech to the percentage of Americans who would describe themselves as knowledgeable about energy. Here are some of the most loved (or hated), most read, most commented on and most viral stats of the year:
1. $1.03 per Watt for c-Si
Right around the time that the solar trade war started, Greentech Media’s editor-in-chief Eric Wesoff asked for a quote for 100 units of 200-watt solar panels from Chinaland Solar Energy. The response was that the cost was about $1.03 per watt for crystalline silicon solar panels with a delivery time of about five days.
The story garnered nearly 60 comments, but that came nowhere near the 137 comments on an article just a few days later about the official start of the solar trade war. In fact, the debate over the pricing and potential dumping of Chinese solar panels was on full display in Wesoff’s brief article about the pricing, which noted, “No company, Chinese or otherwise, can long survive selling products below cost while running a factory at 50 percent utilization rates. At some point, the Chinese government and Chinese banks might have to let these third-tier firms fail.”
In the eight weeks since the uproar from both sides about the solar trade war, the Buy American Solar Amendment passed in the Senate, but as Wesoff noted in his reporting on the issue, creating jobs and value in America isn’t just about manufacturing.
“More than half of those 100,000 jobs are not manufacturing jobs. They are, in fact, downstream jobs in installation, development, project engineering and the like. For every megawatt of solar panels manufactured, more jobs are created downstream than in the actual manufacturing itself. And it's low-cost solar panels that have spurred adoption of solar roofs.”
Although the trade war started in 2011, it will not conclude this year.
