{"id":9609,"date":"2017-03-07T12:14:56","date_gmt":"2017-03-07T01:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/?p=9609"},"modified":"2024-06-04T15:00:07","modified_gmt":"2024-06-04T05:30:07","slug":"sunpower-sma-choose-discreetly-manufacture-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.solarquotes.com.au\/blog\/sunpower-sma-choose-discreetly-manufacture-china\/","title":{"rendered":"SunPower And SMA Choose To (Very Discreetly) Manufacture In China"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"sma

High end manufacturers SunPower And SMA have chosen to manufacture in China.\u00a0But they aren’t exactly advertising the fact.<\/p><\/div>\n

China produces far more solar panels, far more solar inverters, and god knows how many more batteries than any other country in existence.\u00a0 China has been called the workshop of the world1<\/a><\/sup> and has repeatedly shown itself to be capable of producing high quality, reliable goods.<\/p>\n

As examples, the majority of solar panels produced in China are tier one<\/a>, which means major financial organizations trust them for use in large scale solar projects with an expected lifespan of 25 or more years.\u00a0 Some solar inverters manufactured in China are considered among the best in the world, and the lithium battery with the longest warranty I am aware of is made in China.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, China also makes some absolute rubbish.<\/p>\n

This rubbish includes solar panels that deteriorate in sunlight faster than a sparkly vampire and inverters that are about as reliable as a paper condom.<\/p>\n

Chinese Products Are Better Than Their Reputation<\/h2>\n

Here in Australia, the prevailing wisdom seems to be \u00a0that “made in China” means “this is crap”. This is despite the fact that Australians keep buying Chinese goods over and over again, which suggests either they aren’t all crap or that we are very slow learners.<\/p>\n

For example, it beggars belief how many Australians skip right past the good Chinese Tier 1 brands and instead buy lower tier Chinese panels of questionable quality simply because because they have brand names that don’t sound Chinese such as ‘Australian Premium Solar’, ‘German Solar’, ‘Hanover Solar’ or ‘Munchen Solar’.<\/p>\n

I can understand part of this reluctance to realistically appraise Chinese products.\u00a0 We are creatures of habit and like to pigeon hole things.\u00a0 But unless we take the effort to update our opinions every now and then we’ll end up reaching into a hole and instead of finding a pigeon we’ll pull out a whole mess of stupid that will get us into trouble.<\/p>\n

But I think people will soon learn they have to look at the company and not the country to determine the quality of a product.\u00a0 Particularly now that high end solar companies such as SunPower<\/a> and SMA<\/a> have chosen to manufacture in China.<\/p>\n

SunPower To Manufacture P Series Panels In China<\/h2>\n

SunPower<\/a> has its headquarters in the United States, is owned by a French oil company, and has manufacturing capacity in Malaysia, the Phillipines, and Mexico.\u00a0\u00a0 They are one of the oldest solar companies around, the quality of their panels is among the best in the world, and they have the highest efficiency<\/a> of any panel on the market.\u00a0 Because of their panel’s reliability they offer a product warranty of 25 years, which is one of the best in world, but not the best<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because of competition from companies selling less wonderful but much less expensive panels, SunPower is currently going through “restructuring”.\u00a0 This is a word they use to describe closing a factory<\/a> in the Philippines and sacking a heap of people.\u00a0 Part of this restructuring involves moving into manufacturing in China<\/a> in a big way.<\/p>\n

If you want to build a factory in China it can definitely be a good idea to find a Chinese partner.\u00a0 It can even be required by law<\/a>.\u00a0 Having been divorced more times than I’ve been married, I can tell you finding a good partner can be hard.\u00a0 But I’ll assume it was love at first sight when SunPower saw the Chinese large firm DEC.<\/p>\n

Dongfang Electric Company<\/a>, or DEC for short, as well as Tianjin Zhonghuan Semiconductor<\/a>, or TZS, will be partnering up with SunPower to produce their P series<\/a> panels.\u00a0 These have overlapping solar cells and lower efficiency than SunPower’s X series<\/a>, but they do have the advantage they can be made with ordinary and therefore cheaper silicon wafers while still possessing the funky shade tolerance and 25 year product warranty that SunPower panels are known and loved for.<\/p>\n

\"sunpower

Sunpower P-Series. 25 Year Product Warranty. Soon to be made in China. \u00a0\u00a0Image: Sunpower<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

When the factory this hopefully happy partnership is planning to build is completed, it will have 21 solar panel production lines and be capable of producing 5 gigawatts of panels<\/a> a year.\u00a0 That is enormous and if it existed now it would be the largest solar panel factory in the world by far.\u00a0 In 2016 SunPower only manged to produce around 1.65 gigawatts of panels in total.<\/p>\n

SunPower Doesn’t Seem To Want You To Know About This<\/h2>\n

You may think SunPower would be pretty stoked about how they and their partners are going to build the world’s largest solar panel factory, which will allow them to quadruple their production capacity when complete.\u00a0 You might think they’d be boasting about it, but they’re not.<\/p>\n

There’s no mention of it on their press release page <\/a>and according to PV Magazine during their last quarterly earnings call they only made one vague reference<\/a> to China.<\/p>\n

It’s almost as if they are embarrassed by it.\u00a0 But that doesn’t seem right because the first rule of business (currently I have 63 first rules of business) is that the worse the deal you’ve been forced to make, the more you brag about what a great deal it was.<\/p>\n

I suspect their actual motivation is they don’t want people to know they will manufacture in China.\u00a0 If this is the case it seems rather cowardly of them.\u00a0 Either it is a good idea to start manufacturing in China or it’s a bad idea.\u00a0 If it was a good idea then they should be prepared to explain why it is a good idea and how they will make top quality panels in China.\u00a0 If it was a bad idea then they shouldn’t have bloody well decided to do it in the first place.<\/p>\n

But its still early days.\u00a0 Perhaps once SunPower’s Chinese production gets underway they will proudly inform everyone where the panels were made.<\/p>\n

If they do, they will be quite different from Germany’s SMA, which apparently has been building inverters in China for a while now while bending over backwards to hide the fact.<\/p>\n

Germany’s SMA Builds Inverters In China<\/h2>\n

SMA<\/a> is a German company that is generally considered to be among the top two inverter manufacturers in the world in terms of quality and reliability.\u00a0 They have manufacturing capacity in both Germany and China.<\/p>\n

SMA didn’t always used to manufacture in China.\u00a0 In fact, I found the following quote from the year 2012 by a person claiming to be an SMA representative:<\/p>\n

“Please let me assure you that SMA inverters are manufactured in Germany. This is essential to ensure the high quality reputation of SMA. Under no circumstances do we manufacture in China.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is amusing because in 2012 SMA acquired Zeversolar<\/a>, a Chinese inverter manufacturer in Jiangsu<\/a>.\u00a0 But they didn’t use Zeversolar to produce SMA inverters.\u00a0 Instead SMA managed the company which produced inverters under the Zeversolar brand, which is probably one of the better lower cost inverters available.<\/p>\n

But SMA inverters are now made in China<\/a>.\u00a0 Currently SMA’s larger 3 phase inverters are German made, but their smaller single phase ones (AKA the Sunny Boys) are all now Chinese.<\/p>\n

\"sma

The Legendary SMA Sunny Boy Inverter. Now made in China (just like that iPhone). Image: SMA<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Moving production to China was not a sudden move by SMA.\u00a0 They didn’t all get wasted on schnapps one lunchtime and mail the production line to Jiangsu in a drunken afternoon.\u00a0 They had 5 years experience making inverters in China under the Zeversolar brand, so it seems very likely they had the experience required to make the move a success.<\/p>\n

This is exactly the sort of thing I would be telling people if I worked for SMA.\u00a0But they don’t seem to want to mention the fact they are making inverters in China at all.\u00a0 Just like SunPower, there is no mention of it on their press release pages<\/a>. \u00a0In fact if you search their entire website for the word ‘China’<\/a> this is what you see:<\/p>\n

\"search

China you say? No, nothing to see here…<\/p><\/div>\n

Last month\u00a0SMA published a blog post<\/a> “Everything You Need to Know About the New Sunny Boy 3.0\u20135.0 Solar Inverter”. \u00a0Finn tells me he left a comment saying “Everything except the fact that they are the first SMA inverters to be made in China?<\/em>“.<\/p>\n

SMA appear to have deleted Finn’s\u00a0comment.<\/p>\n

Dodging The Truth Makes Good Companies Look\u00a0Bad<\/h2>\n

The reason companies feel the need to hide the fact they manufacture in China is obvious.\u00a0 Plenty of consumers consider the craptastic products produced by some Chinese companies to be representative of the production of the entire People’s Republic of China.<\/p>\n

But companies trying to hide where they manufacture things isn’t going to work. \u00a0These days we have this thing called the internet.\u00a0 It’s been around for a while and probably isn’t going to go away any time soon.\u00a0 People will use it to find out where products are made and crude and boorish internet pedants will mock dissembling companies with vigor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  China produces far more solar panels, far more solar inverters, and god knows how many more batteries than any other country in existence.\u00a0 China has been called the workshop of the world1 and has repeatedly shown itself to be capable of producing high quality, reliable goods.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[182,526,79,399],"class_list":["post-9609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-china","tag-chinese-solar-panels","tag-sma","tag-sunpower","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSunPower And SMA Choose To (Very Discreetly) Manufacture In China - SolarQuotes Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"High end solar component manufacturers SunPower And SMA have chosen to manufacture in China. 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First to SunPower, which has announced it will be supplying 29.9 megawatts of its E-Series panels for rooftop and ground-mount solar projects being developed in France by Tenergie. 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