Chapter 417: Won’t Turn Back Even Hitting A Brick Wall
After Longi Green Energy launched its next-generation photovoltaic module named Halo, it was like firing the starting gun, as large photovoltaic factories rushed to launch their own next-generation photovoltaic modules.
For a time, everyone was discussing photovoltaics, believing it to be the energy revolution of a new era.
Old stock investors (leeks) wore out their calculators, calculating production capacity, revenue, and profit to figure out how much upside there was for individual stocks in the photovoltaic sector.
New stock investors didn’t care about all that; they only looked at sentiment and went by feeling, casually shouting jaw-dropping slogans like charging toward 10,000 points.
“Thanks for the invite. Let me put it this way: Apollo Technology has drastically reduced the cost of going to the moon. Lei Zong’s trip would cost ten billion US dollars. Even if this price drops to one million US dollars in the future, the moon will still be out of reach for 99.9% of people.
But this time, the photoelectric conversion efficiency of photovoltaic modules has increased by 100%, drastically reducing the cost of photovoltaic power generation. Nighttime power generation means photovoltaic power stations can recover costs in about three years now, down from five to seven years in the past.
And in the foreseeable future, equipping residential rooftops with solar panels will become as standard as water heaters.
This will benefit everyone.
Don’t say that the new generation of photovoltaic technology won’t bring down electricity prices; prices will stay the same.
Let me put it this way: this means the country will have more ample foreign exchange reserves, more actively advance new energy vehicles, and for us, the safety of social security and medical insurance will greatly improve.
In the past, everyone worried about social security going bankrupt due to population aging. Our generation might not get social security, but with new technologies continuously landing, the probability of social security bankruptcy will drop significantly.
This benefits most people.
At the national level, there will be more ample fiscal reserves to give welfare to residents and more tools to solve the population aging problem.
These macroeconomic benefits will reach everyone.
It’s just like after tax refunds became widespread, everyone gets an extra red envelope from the country every March.”
“Because the paper was published long ago, not only the industry but the public knew about it. Everyone was unanimously waiting for it to land.
Longi finally fired the first shot.
Now we can finally talk properly about its significance.
In my view, this is not just another technical upgrade, but a revolution in the underlying logic of the photovoltaic industry.
Over the past few decades, all our photovoltaic technology iterations have been like dancing in a ‘room with a roof.’
That roof is the Shockley-Queisser limit.
By continuously optimizing material purity and improving battery structure, we strained to reach that 33.7% ceiling, but we never thought we could break through it.
This is a very typical Lin Ran-style transformation of the impossible into the possible.
Ran Shen led the team to directly redefine the photon-electron interaction at the quantum level.
They were no longer satisfied with one photon exciting one electron-hole pair, but through a complex non-linear probability optimization model, achieved the magical process of one photon generating multiple excitons.
It’s like carving a multi-lane highway out of a single-lane road.
From a technical standpoint, it can be said to be skill surpassing the Way.
This is completely different from traditional tandem batteries.
Tandem batteries are a victory of materials engineering, stacking materials with different band gaps to absorb the spectrum in segments—a strategy of eating in portions.
Whereas this quantum model achieves a leap in energy conversion efficiency within a single-junction battery—a revolution of devouring all energy in one bite.
Tandem batteries have higher costs, worse stability, and shorter lifespan, differing greatly from this structural revolution.
The cost of photovoltaic power generation mainly consists of two parts: first, BOS costs, including land, brackets, cables, construction, etc.; second, module costs.
In the past, as module efficiency improved, though the price per watt dropped, BOS costs remained relatively fixed.
This 40% efficiency breakthrough brings a disruptive change to the photovoltaic economic model.
Power generation doubles, while BOS costs remain almost unchanged.
This means the levelized cost of electricity for power generation will plummet off a cliff.
It will make the cost of photovoltaic power generation far lower than any fossil fuel, and possibly even lower than nuclear energy in the future.
The improved weak-light power generation capability makes power station revenue more stable.
Investors no longer need to worry excessively about losses from cloudy days or early mornings and evenings, greatly reducing investment risk and shortening the payback period.
If you have connections to get the goods, consider building charging stations.
The model with next-generation photovoltaic batteries on top and charging piles below.
Operate it yourself, sell excess electricity to the power grid, and supply power directly during the day.
This is definitely a business opportunity, a sure-profit venture for a long time.
For a long time, the energy landscape has been dominated by the three oil barrels and natural gas.
Renewable energy is the trend, but its intermittency and volatility are unavoidable pain points.
Energy storage is developing, but high costs remain a bottleneck.
This quantum photovoltaic technology directly solves these two pain points.
A more stable, more efficient photovoltaic power generation system will completely reshape the world’s energy map.
As the birthplace of this technology, China will have absolute discourse power and pricing power.
This is no longer just an industrial advantage, but a monopoly on core technology.
This advantage is even more strategically significant than our advantages in high-speed rail and 5G.
Because this is energy, the lifeblood of industrial civilization.
Soon we’ll see resource-poor countries like Japan and Korea coming to negotiate technology imports.
This technological breakthrough is far from just a numbers game at a commercial press conference. It is an industrial revolution driven by basic physics theory, elevating the photovoltaic industry from manufacturing to a high technology industry.
It shows us that in key scientific fields, like the aerospace field, Ran Shen has once again shifted China’s status from follower to definer.
On Zhihu, professionals from all walks have come out to analyze the significance. From concept to landing, China took a year and a half, advancing the past analyses further, thanks to the change in weak-light power generation.
Sato Kazuhiko, director of the Technology Environment Bureau of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, invited industry expert Nishino Takayuki, senior researcher from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tokyo, and official Tanaka Ken from the Trade Policy Bureau to discuss countermeasures.
Sato spoke first: “Professor Nishino, Tanaka, I assume you’ve carefully read Longi Company’s press conference report.
I want to hear your most direct views, without any embellishment.
This is no longer simple technical leadership. Can we describe it as dimensional reduction strike?”
Tanaka Ken looked serious: “Director Sato, from a trade policy perspective, the situation is extremely grave.
This not only changes the technical track of the global photovoltaic market but may reshape the international energy power balance.
If they can mass-produce 40% efficiency modules at highly competitive prices, we will completely lose pricing power in the global market.
More importantly, we once aimed to use photovoltaics to reduce dependence on Middle East energy, but now we may face another strategic dependence on China in core energy technology.”
Sato said helplessly: “Dependence—this is the outcome we least want to see.
Professor Nishino, from a technical perspective, do we still have a chance to catch up?
Our companies have invested massive R&D resources in heterojunction and perovskite tandem batteries. Have these efforts been wiped out overnight?”
Nishino Takayuki’s face was exceptionally gloomy; he felt as bad as if he had eaten shit inside: “Wiped out? No, it’s self-destruction! Director, a year and a half ago, when Professor Lin’s theoretical model was published in Nature, I submitted a report to the ministry! I warned that this is a completely different technical direction, one that will disrupt all existing silicon-based photovoltaics!
If I’m not mistaken, Professor Lin publicly stated back then that they could mass-produce soon.”
Nishino Takayuki took a deep breath to calm his emotions: “I suggested back then that Japan should immediately organize forces for parallel research or attempt to establish technology exchange channels with the Chinese side.
But our companies? They told me HIT is Japan’s pride, a mature technical route.
They told me perovskite tandem batteries are the next-generation mainstream.
They poured all resources into the old track, completely ignoring future possibilities.
That was Professor Lin, the man who built a base on the moon. Why would our companies ignore his theory? Even without publishing the specific model, it was proven feasible at the theoretical level.
Now? All our R&D investments have become laughable sunk costs!
They’re still discussing how to raise lab heterojunction efficiency from 35% to 36%, while others have achieved 40%!”
Japanese companies are not just ordinarily conservative; they are stubbornly unyielding.
This is textbook classic.
Paul John Flory is a master-level figure in polymer chemistry; he personally won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Many of Flory’s late-life achievements were actually big pitfalls, especially in the crystal oscillation field, where some of his conclusions were wrong.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many Japanese chemists studied under Flory.
These chemists later became big shot figures in Japan’s chemistry field, determining the research direction in Japan’s polymer chemistry.
These big shots inherited Flory’s achievements, including the erroneous parts. Under their leadership, to this day, much of Japan’s chemical industry research still races along Flory’s model!
Meanwhile, the Europe and America chemistry community began critiquing Flory as early as the 1990s. In the home of this big brother, America, his doctrines in macromolecular crystal fields were thoroughly re-examined. Today’s America chemistry community has no institution continuing research along erroneous theories.
Yet this doesn’t stop Japan’s chemistry, physics, and industrial circles from year after year sending scholars to America for further study, repeating their predecessors’ experiments to validate the correctness of the Flory school model.
As long as the Flory model is correct, it proves the contemporary Japanese polymer chemistry teachers are correct, validating all the efforts of Japan’s chemistry predecessors since the 1970s.
Japan’s style is not just refusing to turn back until hitting a dead end, but not turning back even after hitting it.
To this day, Japanese companies are still diligently producing consumer electronics products like mobile phones, televisions, and computers in a thick old-century style.
The photovoltaic field is the same. Not to mention Lin Ran only proposed the model; even now that Longi Green Energy has launched the product, the research departments of Japanese companies reacted slower than the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry officials—they haven’t even bothered to dig out Lin Ran’s paper for discussion.
They’re still discussing how to do HIT today, how to do heterojunction.
Japan’s technical routes are mainly two: Sharp’s HIT and Kyocera’s back-contact technology. These are all about optimizing silicon-based battery performance. No matter how fancy you get, you can’t break the Shockley-Queisser limit.
Tanaka Ken asked: “So, we can’t catch up in the short term?”
Nishino Takayuki said gravely: “Impossible in the short term.
This requires a brand-new theoretical foundation, brand-new materials, and brand-new manufacturing processes.
This is not a simple technical upgrade; it’s a redefinition of the industry.
If we insist on continuing investments in the old technical route, we’ll just waste more resources.
We must face reality: China has shown astonishing originality in basic science fields, especially applied physics.”
Sato took a deep breath: “So, what is our response plan? What can we do? Subsidize our companies like in the past? Or seek technical cooperation?”
Tanaka Ken quickly replied: “Directly seek technology licensing! Our relations with China are good lately; we have extensive cooperation with China in the semiconductor field. We can consider it from a higher strategic level.
We could consider establishing high-level joint ventures with them.
We provide our advantages in precision manufacturing, quality control, and materials science in exchange for their core technology.
This not only gets us the technology but keeps part of the industrial chain in Japan and maintains our competitiveness in high-end manufacturing.”
The new generation photovoltaic technology is public for Chinese companies, but not public for foreign enterprises.
A flash of approval passed through Sato’s eyes, but he soon fell into thought: “At this point in time, political issues undoubtedly don’t exist. Compromising with Chinese people—isn’t that the most normal thing?
Chiyoda’s big shots, when talking about China, no one dares mention confrontation; at most they say competition.
Mention cooperation, and everyone raises hands and feet in approval, eager to bind even tighter with China’s economy.”
Such cooperation in the past would require very bold political decisions.
Now, even Canon’s NIL can be sold—what can’t be sold?
The fear is not selling fast enough or not getting a good price.
