Visiting China's solar ruins
Because the once world-largest solar group Yingli failed to pay its bills, a German mid-sized company slid into insolvency. A visit to the ruins.
Because the once world-largest solar group Yingli from China failed to pay its bills, a German mid-sized company slid into insolvency. Our correspondent visited the ruins of the company in China’s solar capital Baoding.
Background
The report documents the dark side of China's solar rise: factories that had to close after price collapses and overcapacity. In the first round of global solar competition – the years 2011 to 2013 – many Chinese manufacturers went bankrupt. Suntech, then the world's second-largest module maker, filed for insolvency in 2013; LDK Solar followed.
But the industry consolidated and then went on the offensive globally. Backed by massive state subsidies, cheap loans from state-led banks and the huge home market, Chinese manufacturers were able to push the price of solar modules down from over three dollars per watt (2010) to under 20 US cents per watt (2024). The price collapse was the main reason why Western manufacturers – Q-Cells in Germany, BP Solar, REC Solar in Norway – gave up one after the other or were taken over by Chinese investors.
Today, more than 80 percent of the world's solar modules are made in China. In wafer and cell production the share is over 90 percent. The leading manufacturers – Longi, Trina Solar, Jinko Solar, JA Solar – have grown into global companies, often vertically integrated from polysilicon to the finished module.
The same dynamic – massive state subsidies, overcapacity, price collapse, displacement of foreign competitors – is now playing out in other sectors: in electric vehicles, batteries, wind turbines, solar inverters. The European Commission imposed anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese EVs in 2024; ongoing investigations also concern solar and wind components.
The irony of the solar boom: it has dramatically lowered the cost of the energy transition worldwide, while at the same time eroding Western capacity to build these capacities itself. The solar ruins of this report were the start of a development that today dominates German and European industrial policy: how can climate protection be advanced without losing one's own industrial base to China?