Knocking on Mexico's Solar Door

Q: What elements of Mexico’s energy market and the reform spiked LONGi Green Energy Technology’s interest?

A: The first element that interested us was the demand factor. Mexico has exhibited strong economic growth, which will foster energy demand in the coming years. The Mexican government is determined to keep the Energy Reform on the road to success and this will help boost the percentage of renewables in the energy mix. We are convinced that Mexico’s PV market has bright days ahead of it, and we want to take advantage of every opportunity.

Q: How did LONGi Green Energy Technology achieve its low LCOE solutions?

A: From the beginning, we focused on monocrystalline technology because intrinsically it constitutes a better material for efficient energy conversion, demonstrates better energy yield, and delivers better value (lower LCOE) for end users. The main obstacle for widespread mono module adoption was the higher cost in manufacturing a mono wafer in the past. For the last 17 years, we have focused our efforts on technology development in mono wafer manufacturing to improve productivity and performance, thus driving down cost. Our company was founded in 2000, yet by 2013 we were the largest mono wafer manufacturer in the world. At the end of 2014, we acquired Lerri Solar, a small module manufacturer in China, to strategically move downstream to solar cell and module manufacturing, and deliver the value of mono technology closer to our end users. Because we can produce highefficiency mono modules at lower costs, ensuring better value for our customers and the end user, we have delivered more than 3GW of mono modules to the market within two years, increasing our market share of mono modules in China from 5 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2016. We expect this share to reach 35 percent by the end of 2017.

Q: How does the company’s focus on research and development set it apart from other PV manufacturers?

A: In 2014, we expanded from our initial business in mono wafers and ingots to mono cells and modules, as well as project development, to become a truly vertically integrated company. Technology has always been a primary aspect of our company, compared to other PV manufacturers. We consistently invest 5-7 percent of our total revenue into technology research and development. Our company always strives to develop better equipment to improve productivity and better technology to improve performance, which translates into a consistent trend of increasingly competitive products with better performance and lower cost.

Q: What client portfolio are you targeting in Mexico?

A: We believe all segments of the market are important, with particular interest in distributed generation applications. In Mexico, the majority of the volume in renewable energy is still owned by utility-scale projects. With the distributed generation sector (industrial, commercial and residential) expanding at a much faster rate, and the much higher value of our high efficiency mono modules, we think we will have a larger impact in distributed generation applications to help the industry bring down total system cost, as well as lower LCOE with better energy yield.

Q: What are LONGi’s longer term plans for Mexico?

A: Our company goes hand-in-hand with high performance, high quality and competitive prices. We are trying to understand the market, going through a learning phase, learning how to work with local players, letting our customers understand the value of highefficiency mono modules so we can make an even better contribution. Mexico and Latin America are important markets for LONGi Green Energy Technology and we are committed to bringing high quality, better performance mono modules at a competitive price to those markets. We hope to become a significant part of the market so more and more customers can realize the value of highefficiency mono modules.