Overview

The solar industry has been plagued over the past few years by destructive boom and bust cycles, clearly indicating that vendors — from polysilicon to module makers — have made a mad dash to add capacity, even as the market was turning down. This overcapacity has had disastrous effects on industry-wide pricing and company solvency, and has triggered an industry-wide shakeout that is still unraveling. To date, the lack of clear and accurate data on production and capacity at each step of the value chain has exacerbated the capacity build-up, while leading to unreasonably high market size forecasts through double-counting of capacity and inaccurate discounting of proposed future capacity. To help accurately manage expectations and identify supply trends, Lux Research has developed the Solar Supply Tracker, the most accurate industry supply tracker to date — which pulls on primary interviews with manufacturers at all steps on the value chain and Lux Research's critical analysis of technology feasibility for emerging technologies.

The Solar Supply Tracker is a flexible platform that allows the user to input proprietary data and manipulate Lux Research's underlying assumptions. This dynamic tool supports a comprehensive quantity of easily customized graphical and data outputs ready for instant insertion into any reporting format.

Starting Q4 2011, the Solar Supply Tracker is named based on the publishing quarter.

Highlights

Explore the Solar Supply Tracker in LuxPrism

Downloads

Download the full dataset in Excel

For advanced analysis and offline exploration of the Solar Supply Tracker, the full data set is available for download.

These files are available to subscribers of the Lux Research Solar Components service.

Key findings