Chinese solar firms ‘quietly shed’ one-third of their workers — 87,000 solar jobs gone

https://joannenova.com.au/2025/08/shh-chinese-solar-firms-sacked-one-third-of-their-workers-87000-solar-jobs-gone/

By Jo Nova

The invisible shrinking solar industry

Quietly, the world manufacturing base for solar panels has been shrinking for nearly two years and yet hardly anyone knows.  Especially not the Prime Minister of Australia who set up the the $1 billion Solar Sunshot a year ago to artificially create an Australian solar panel manufacturing industry, twenty years too late, and with the worst possible timing.

China has already captured the solar market and killed it.

Gluts have consequences

The CCP is making twice as many solar panels as the world wants to buy.  The latest trend is from bad to worse.

Let’s remember this story, the next time the propaganda media try to tell us solar panels are setting new records. Isn’t this the sort of thing our investigative sleuths at the ABC-BBC-CBC should have been digging out before elections were held? Doesn’t this change everything?

Australia is supposed to be going gangbusters “leading the world” and installing 22,000 panels a day to meet our Net Zero target, but no one else in the world is doing that.

China’s solar giants quietly shed a third of their workforces last year

Reuters

BEIJING, August 1 (Reuters) – China’s biggest solar firms shed nearly one-third of their workforces last year, company filings show, as one of the industries hand-picked by Beijing to drive economic growth grapples with falling prices and steep losses.

Layoffs are politically sensitive in China, where Beijing views employment as key to social stability. Other than a 5% cut acknowledged by Longi last year, none of the firms mentioned above have announced any job cuts or responded to questions from Reuters.
“The industry has been facing a downturn since the end of 2023,” said Cheng Wang, an analyst at Morningstar. “In 2024, it actually got worse. In 2025, it looks like it’s getting even worse.”

There is a glut on our grids too

The Duck Curve has been quacking on grids in California and Australia for years. Finally the market is starting to pay people what solar power is really worth.  Many solar feed in tariffs in Australia are shrinking to nothing. The tragedy is that this was not done 10 years ago, so homeowners were not misled (and not squeezed to cough up the payments to subsidize too).

… 4 million Australian homeowners are set for disappointment as energy retailers all but stop buying their solar power  blowing out the promised return on investment (ROI) and pushing customers towards costly batteries.

Solar customers in Victoria, in particular, recently received notifications from their retailers that their feed-in tariff (FIT) had been slashed as of 1 July,…

Excess solar is so toxic, that prices are negative.  Things are so crazy, solar farms often have to disconnect at midday, right at their peak, or they will have to pay people to take the power away.
Unlike all the expert prophesies, coal production is still growing, and solar factories are the stranded assets.
h/t To Paul Homewood at  NotaLotOfPeopleKnowThat for the story idea.

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