Tongwei Solar: A Lot Can Change In Five Years

It’s a little over five years since SolarQuotes first discovered Tongwei Solar, back then a manufacturer mostly turning silicon ingots into solar cells sold to panel manufacturers.

As we said in 2019, Tongwei Solar had no presence in Australia and had not sought Clean Energy Council approval – not surprising since, at the time, it wasn’t focused on solar panels but was essentially a white label behind other panel manufacturers.

As such it was, however, a heavyweight solar cell maker, producing 12GW a year.

But in 2023, a lot has changed: Tongwei Solar is now a broad-based manufacturer with a stable of finished solar panels and uses the brand “TW Solar” in Australia

As of May 2023, the company had 40 modules approved by the CEC. It first started obtaining CEC approvals in July 2020 and by the end of that year had ten modules approved; another ten followed in 2022, and so far this year a further 20 have been added.

Earlier this month, Tongwei Solar’s CTO Guoqiang Xing discussed the company’s ambitions with TaiyangNews.

He said Tongwei has been concentrating on R&D in the modules market, but even so,

“we shipped several GW of modules last year”.

Its next goal, he said, is to

“expand our business into modules and become vertically integrated.”

Tongwei hopes to have an incredible 80GW of solar panel capacity by the end of 2023, compared to a mere 14GW in 2022.

The other change Australian buyers might have noticed is that with products on the CEC’s approved list, TW Solar has also inked distribution agreements with One Stop Warehouse, Bluesun, Solar Juice and Raystech.

Note from Finn:

We’ll write a detailed post on TW Solar’s offering in the Australian market soon. Looking at the Australian solar retailers currently offering them, they appear to have gone for the cheaper end of the market, and the specs look typical of a modern, budget solar panel.

Download (PDF)

As for how well-supported they are in Australia, we’ll need to investigate whether Tongwei has invested in a proper Australian support office. We’ll also ask installers we trust about their experience with them once TW Solar panels have been on Australian roofs for at least a couple of years. Then we’ll consider whether to put them on our approved brands chart.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/tongwei-solar-five-years/