by Hanno Labuschagne
Oversupply and a price battle between Chinese manufacturers with growing manufacturing capacity have sent solar panel and battery prices in South Africa downwards in the last few months.
That is according to two reputed solar installation companies — AWPower and Solar Advice.
In May 2023, Bloomberg reported that Longi Green Energy Technology — the world’s largest solar manufacturer — slashed the prices of silicon wafers by as much as 31%.
That came after solar silicon prices had already declined by almost half from early February 2023.
A significant contributing factor has been several new factories ramping up production and helping to end a shortage of the material in 2021 and 2022.
Green Building Africa also reported that prices of solar panel modules in the US had dropped to a two-year low in May 2023.
On a local level, MyBroadband found that the prices of solar panels from Solar Advice have decreased substantially compared to the start of the year.
The price of a 455W Jinko Solar Mono Percium solar panel has decreased from R3,563.85 on 19 January 2023 to R2,830.78 on 19 July 2023, a reduction of 20.6%.
The larger 545W Monocrystalline solar panel from JA Solar saw its price decline from R4,477.34 to R3,428.31 over the same period, an even bigger plunge of 23.4%.
