This week's view: the EU's photovoltaic installation plan has accelerated the transformation of clean energy
The EU has launched the renewable energy installation plan, and the construction of roof photovoltaic and ground power stations has been promoted simultaneously. Recently, the EU has supplemented and revised the previously released REpower EU action plan. It plans to increase the proportion of renewable energy in the overall energy structure from 40% to 45% by 2030. In addition, it plans to complete the installation and deployment of 320gw / 600gw of photovoltaic by 2025 / 2030. In terms of specific measures, the EU plans to require all new buildings in the future to meet the installation conditions of roof photovoltaic system, and force all buildings that meet the standards to install roof photovoltaic system. At the same time, the EU will promote the construction progress of large-scale ground power stations by ensuring the income of power stations, accelerating the speed of approval and broadening diversified application scenarios.
At this stage, the European photovoltaic industry is highly dependent on imports, and China's photovoltaic industry is expected to fully benefit. According to the data of Eurostat, in 2020, the EU imported about 8 billion euros of photovoltaic modules, of which 75% were provided by China, and only a small part of the modules were produced by itself. With the continuous improvement of photovoltaic installed capacity in the future, the European Commission believes that strong import dependence has restricted the long-term development of its photovoltaic industry to a certain extent. The European Union is planning to expand and improve the existing photovoltaic industry chain, especially manufacturing links. Nevertheless, we believe that China's photovoltaic industry has significant advantages in terms of technology, cost and production capacity, and will fully benefit from the growth of European Photovoltaic installation demand in the future.
The European market demand is improving, and the prosperity of China's photovoltaic industry chain continues. In recent years, the continuous improvement of PV installation demand in Europe has significantly driven the export of Chinese components, inverters and other products. Since 2022, affected by the Russian Ukrainian war and other factors, energy prices in Europe have risen rapidly, and the installation demand has risen to a higher level. From January to April 2022, China's export of components to Europe reached 42.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 139.8%, and the export of inverters also reached 5.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 50.4%. With the issuance of the EU photovoltaic development plan, we expect that the long-term photovoltaic installation space in Europe will be further expanded. Considering that the EU's own industrial chain is not enough to support large-scale demand growth, we believe that China's photovoltaic product export will maintain a high growth trend, and the prosperity of the industrial chain is expected to continue.
Market review this week: the power equipment sector performed strongly in the 19th week of 2022
This week, the power equipment sector rose 7.3%, outperforming the CSI 300 index by 5.0%, among which the photovoltaic equipment sector performed best (+ 11.6%), other power equipment (+ 5.4%) and battery (+ 4.8%) sectors increased relatively little.
Industrial chain tracking: this week, the price of lithium battery industry chain has stabilized, and the photovoltaic industry chain has increased steadily
Lithium battery: the marginal impact of the epidemic has improved, and the output of the new energy vehicle industry chain has rebounded. This week, except for the fluctuation of some upstream metal prices, the prices of cathode materials, cathode materials, electrolyte and diaphragm have stabilized as a whole.
Photovoltaic: the prices of silicon materials, cells and modules rose slightly this week, and the price of silicon chips stabilized. Demand at home and abroad continued to improve. At the same time, the impact of the epidemic on production and logistics gradually subsided, the component link maintained a high operating rate, the high price of silicon stabilized, and the prices of silicon wafers and batteries also had strong support.
Risk tips: changes in new energy industry policies, supply chain bottlenecks lead to lower than expected demand, intensified market competition leads to decline in industry profitability, etc.
