European Solar Industry Calls on Lawmakers to Close Glaring Supply Chain Gap

Europe assembles solar panels in quantity but barely makes the materials that go into them — and an industry coalition wants the bloc’s forthcoming Industrial Accelerator Act to fix that imbalance.

More than 35 companies and institutions have jointly petitioned the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, urging legislators to use the IAA to rebuild the full photovoltaic supply chain from quartz to finished module. The trigger is a striking structural gap: the bloc operates more than 75 module assembly facilities, yet ingot and wafer production amounts to a single project, and polysilicon manufacturing to a single plant.

The coalition also highlights that the EU is home to at least 38 specialist equipment manufacturers who, for several stages of panel production, represent the only non-Chinese alternative available anywhere in the world — a part of the chain the signatories want policy support for.

The European Solar Manufacturing Council frames the ask in market terms rather than subsidy terms: investors need a predictable domestic demand signal and protection from dumped imports, not grants. Researchers at Fraunhofer ISE back the economic case with modelling that puts a closed 30 GW annual supply chain at roughly 80,000 direct and indirect jobs and a €4 billion addition to EU GDP, at a wholesale electricity cost premium of 0.25 euro cents per kilowatt-hour.

The IAA is currently moving through parliamentary committees, with the Council expected to adopt a common position within weeks. The signatories want the final text to include explicit European-content requirements, though they stop short of calling for those rules to apply automatically to countries that hold free trade agreements with the EU.

Source: pv Europe