Jupiter International Sticks to Solar Cell Roots Amid Expansion
India’s Jupiter International is staying close to its roots as a solar cell manufacturer even as it embarks on vertical integration to navigate the country’s new solar landscape, according to the company’s CEO, Dhurv Sharma, during an OPIS interview at the Renewable Energy India Expo on Oct. 3.
The company has long been India’s largest pure play solar cell producer with an 800-megawatt (MW) facility at its Himachal Pradesh stronghold in northern India. But come next April, it would have added 1.4 gigawatts (GW) of module capacity from a new joint-venture Odisha plant in eastern India. Its total module capacity is then expected to rise to 2.8 GW in September and to 4.8 GW in December 2026. By then, the company’s cell capacity would have risen to 7 GW with another 3 GW of wafer capacity added further upstream.
“We still want to be largely a cell manufacturer but with a lot of command on cell technology and some integration into quality module manufacturing,” Sharma said.
Even with the new integration plans, Jupiter’s cell capacity would still be significantly higher than its module capacity, Sharma noted. The company is also already in discussions to sell solar cells from its 2026 capacity to other module manufacturers, he added.
So why take the drastic step of expanding into the modules segment in the first place?
Sharma, a longtime advocate for Indian solar manufacturing, has been with Jupiter from the beginning when the company set up its first cell facility in 2009 with a capacity of just 32 MW. In the years since, Sharma has focused on expanding the company’s cell capacity without extending into the upstream or downstream segments.
But the regulatory landscape in India’s solar industry has undergone a sea change in the past two years. After having spent the better part of the 2010s rallying industry peers and government officials to better support Indian solar manufacturers against low-priced imports from China, Sharma now sees clear government support for the local industry, setting the stage for a new era of aggressive capacity expansion by domestic manufacturers.
“The government of India today…is willing to protect domestic manufacturing against the asset deflation that China is exporting in the solar context. We now have a clear understanding that the government wants to enable a larger solar manufacturing base,” Sharma said.
Over the past two years, the Chinese Module Marker (CMM), the OPIS marker for FOB China module prices, has fallen from $0.265/wp to $0.09/wp as of Oct. 1. While the price deflation is a boon to project developers, it is also a bane to domestic solar manufacturers unable to compete with Chinese imports in the absence of government support.
India currently has a slew of trade measures and incentive schemes to support its domestic solar manufacturers, including a 40% basic customs duty and an Approved List of Models and Manufacturers (ALMM), an exclusionary list from which government projects can only source their modules.
Ensuring the “demand visibility” that ALMM provides is very important for local manufacturers, Sharma said. Based on the balance sheets of listed companies in China, Chinese solar manufacturers are selling modules at a loss despite their large capacities, he noted.
“Circumstances like these require multiple support packages (for the domestic industry). It cannot be a very simple approach,” Sharma said.
Despite the improved government support for domestic manufacturers, Sharma remains mindful of the price volatility and crashes that have besieged the solar industry in recent years. Vertically integrating into the module and wafer segments is a way to “protect and de-risk the business”, he said.
The solar veteran, perhaps untypically, also tends to shy away from the hyperbolic talk normally associated with a burgeoning industry — even his assessment of solar cell technologies is measured. At a time when Chinese manufacturers have switched en masse to the newer TOPCon cell technology, Sharma still sees value in the previous incumbent Mono PERC technology.
In Sharma’s view, the switch to TOPCon technology happened very quickly at a time when the solar industry was distressed with price falls and overcapacity.
“In normal circumstances it takes a while for new technologies to mature and be adopted. But companies have rushed into adoption and mainstreaming of the Topcon technology, whether due to competitive pressure or combination of various factors.,” Sharma said.
“If I had to take a decision today (on whether to use TOPCon in a project), I would be happy to push it off by another five to six months,” he added.
Jupiter’s new solar projects, the first of which is scheduled to be ready in five to six months time, will be based on TOPCon technology.
In keeping with the theme of hewing close to its roots, Jupiter will not be focusing on overseas markets for now despite growing Indian solar exports to the US.
“Ideally, producers who manufacture at where the market is are the ones who will succeed. And for us, that is India,” Sharma said.
Reporting by Hanwei Wu, hwu@opisnet.com
Editing by Lujia Wang, lwang@opisnet.com
© 2024 Oil Price Information Service, LLC. All rights reserved.