No one is building new capacity (with current tech) because existing factories are operating at a loss.
As for new tech, 1366 Technologies has built a factory in Malaysia and was expected to ramp up their kerf-less wafer production in Q3 2019 for sale to Hanwha at their neighboring plant.
I am certainly hopeful that eventually new capacity will come online that can compete with existing factories, but the fact remains that numbers from a linear programming model do not mean that the factories exist to build all that solar.
China is where the ecosystem of experienced manufacturers, material suppliers, and manufacturing equipment suppliers all comes together now. The rest of the world's solar manufacturers are struggling because the Chinese ones have such economies of scale that it's difficult to compete head-on. (Barring perhaps First Solar. First Solar is still doing ok because it has achieved multi-gigawatt manufacturing scale too, and because its product has advantages when operating in high temperature conditions. Also there are a few other solar manufacturers that can weather the storm because they're part of large conglomerates, like LG.)
Non-Chinese solar manufacturers like to cry "unfair competition" at low Chinese solar prices, but after reading industry trade publications for several years I am skeptical of that argument. To me it looks like Chinese PV companies did get government protection and incentives to establish themselves, but no worse than Western countries give to their own favored industries. And now they can produce good products at unbeatable prices. Not a whole lot different from Japan overtaking American radio and TV manufacturers in decades past, or (more recently) China rapidly overtaking incumbents to become the world's largest lithium ion battery manufacturer.
That doesn't mean the factories can't be built, it means it doesn't make economic sense to build them right now, in the current global environment that still lacks carbon taxes or the equivalent. It also means it does not yet make sense to rip out much of the installed capacity and replace it with renewables (a point that requires a lower price than just dominating replacement of end-of-life plants and building for growth in demand.)
Agreed. I think one way of looking at it is that building factories does not scale in the same way as building plants. You can build a plant that produces 1GW base and it can start generating when you turn it on. An equivalent factory making 250MWp of solar PV cells will take 20 years of production to build up to an equivalent installed base (when it can start producing cells to replace retired 20 year-old cells.)
If you try to scale up factories for faster growth you will have to start shutting them down when you hit an oversupply after 5-10 years and then where will your replacement cells come from?
I think it's just a speed bump due to running into limits on new capacity. In the US, for example, demand for electrical energy is nearly flat. Once the price of renewables falls enough the existing plant (much of which is only there because the capital cost is sunk) will start being replaced before its EoL.
BTW, the argument being made here against renewables would apply equally well against nuclear. Hail Mary Reactors will also require scaling up of factories to make them.
