The solar industry continues its high flight this year — and the recent SNEC Shanghai and Intersolar Munich trade shows were a testament to that. These leading global solar trade fairs were held within 2 weeks of each other in 2 major solar markets of the world – China and Germany –, and both saw record participation in 2023.
On the first day of SNEC, there were somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 attendees. Indeed, it was so crowded that the mobile network collapsed in a few halls of the trade fair. Overall, SNEC saw a footfall of 260,000 attendees. This was somewhat expected as it was the first time after 2019 that SNEC was open to international participants without any travel restrictions. While Intersolar was already busy last year, strong European demand, also driven by the energy crisis on the continent, made it even bigger and busier as well. The trade show was sold out, over 100,000 visitors joined.
Both events together probably showed almost every new product released in the first half of the year that was worth knowing about in the solar sector.
Thus, continuing what we started last year, we have visited these 2 leading trade shows and compiled a report with interesting and innovative solar products on display, mostly modules, but also bill of materials (BOM), balance of system (BOS), production equipment, and storage and software solutions (see report structure below). There is no one particular hot topic, every stream presented many interesting and innovative solutions. However, if you had to pick one outstanding theme, then it is TOPCon solar cell technology hitting the mainstream. This report includes plenty of news about TOPCon products.
As prelude to the 2 shows, TaiyangNews organized a virtual conference called “Global PV System Technology Trends H1/2023“, which had the global leading module players present their latest innovations. This report also provides the take-aways from the presentations of our event.
While the report also has a section for production equipment, only few are included as they have been covered in recent technology reports, in particular our Market Survey on Cell Production Equipment 2023.
