India has set some of the world's firmest timetables for making its own solar gear, giving manufacturers advance warning before closing the door on imports. The approach has moved step by step up the value chain. Modules came first, cells follow this December, domestic module capacity now stands close to 200 gigawatts, and yet the machines that fill those plants are still bought from China, ReNew chairman and chief executive Sumant Sinha told Semafor. ReNew is among India's largest renewable developers, so its sourcing tends to follow the government's lead.
Beijing has now moved to tighten its grip on the know-how behind that machinery. Technologies for making polysilicon, wafers and solar cells, along with the key equipment that carries them, would be added to the national catalog of restricted exports under a proposal that also covers artificial intelligence and biomedicine, with public comment open into mid-November and exporters required to register transfers in the meantime, China's commerce and science ministries said this month. Items on that list cannot leave the country freely. For Indian firms planning cell and wafer lines, the timing is awkward.
The squeeze is already visible on factory floors. Many smaller Indian module makers halted output or shortened production runs this summer while waiting months for domestic cells, and New Delhi pushed its cell deadline to December for some projects after complaints about shortages, Reuters reported in July. Larger integrated producers have been better placed to ride it out. Smaller assemblers, which rely on bought-in cells, have not.
Indian-made panels cost more than Chinese ones, and Sinha does not dispute it. He put the production gap at about 20%, widening to roughly 30% on selling price because Chinese makers are discounting heavily, said the difference is passed on to consumers as the price of localizing supply, and acknowledged that "there's nowhere else for us to go but to go to China" for equipment, something Beijing has "wised up to," in his interview with Semafor. The question Sinha raises is whether any country can build a clean-energy industry when a single supplier controls the tools.