On November 23, according to foreign media reports, Singapore PV module manufacturer REC Silicon (hereinafter referred to as: REC) announced plans to close two polysilicon plants in northern Europe due to high electricity prices.
"Unfortunately, we can no longer produce high-purity silicon in Norway." Jan Enno Bicker, chief executive of REC, recently told Norwegian media that the current price of electricity for Chinese silicon companies is about 0.4 Norwegian kroner (about 0.2659 yuan), while the price they pay in the Norwegian electricity market is ten times that of Chinese companies. Coincidentally
, Norwegian solar producers Norwegian Crystals and Norsun recently announced that they would stop their wafer business. The former filed for bankruptcy at the end of August, and the latter announced plans to open a 5G W factory in the United States.
According to media reports, REC restarted its polysilicon plant in Norway in March this year, but then shut down again in August due to high local electricity prices. Affected
by the closure of the Norwegian plant, the cumulative loss of REC will reach 335 million Norwegian kroner, or about 222.71 million yuan.
However, the loss of the company's polysilicon business did not start recently. In the fourth quarter of 2022, REC achieved revenue of $31.5 million (RMB 225 million) and a loss of $23.5 million (RMB 168 million). The company said it was caused by the decrease in sales of polysilicon and silane gas in the fourth quarter.
This situation did not improve in the first quarter of this year. In the first quarter of 2023, the company continued to be affected by the decrease in sales of silane gas and polysilicon, and its net profit loss expanded to 34.4 million US dollars (about 246 million RMB) in the current period. Meanwhile, the company's polysilicon sales also fell 36% year-on-year to 183 tons.
Despite losses in its polysilicon business, the company is still planning to restart 16,000 tons of solar-grade granular silicon capacity at its Moses Lake plant in the United States, which was shut down in 2019 after losing out in competition with Chinese companies.
It is worth noting that although REC announced the closure of Norwegian factories mainly because the local electricity price is too expensive, can US electricity price guarantee the company to gain the upper hand in the competition with Chinese enterprises?
Otherwise, in the fourth quarter of last year, the company's polysilicon plant in Bart, Montana, also lost money due to a sharp rise in electricity prices.
Therefore, the driving force supporting its restart of factories in the United States is someone else. A night view
of the REC Silicon plant in
Moses Lake before it was closed a few years ago. In January 2022, Hanwha paid $100 million for REC's REC Silicon ASA. 16.67% of the shares, and then gradually increased the shareholding ratio to 33.3%, becoming the largest shareholder of the silicon company.
In September, Hanwha went on to announce a 10-year long-term contract for granular silicon with the company, promising to pay a large amount of advance payment to help the latter restart its factory in Moses Lake, Washington, by November 1.
In November, four years and eight months after ceasing operations, REC's Moses Lake facility officially restarted.
In recent years, supported by the Inflation Reduction Act of the United States and the domestic demand for photovoltaics in the United States, many companies have announced that they will invest heavily in building factories in the United States, among which Hanwha is the fastest. In
January, Qcells announced plans to invest more than 2.5 billion yuan in the United States to build an industrial complex in Bartow County, Georgia, for the production of solar ingots, wafers, cells and modules, and to expand its Dalton plant.
From silicon materials to modules, Qcells may become the first company to establish a fully integrated silicon-based solar supply chain in the United States.
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