The Impact of Countries’ Roles on the International Photovoltaic Trade Pattern: The Complex Networks Analysis

Abstract

Abstract:The expansion of the international PV trade encourages governments to focus on their trade roles in this market, which has increasing impact on their future development of sustainable energy. Thus, an exploration of top traders and their influence on global PV trade pattern is essential as governments seek to develop strategies to improve their global PV market's discourse power. This study introduces the complex network theory to examine top traders whose default would lead to the collapse of trade pattern and their impactful ways. Moreover, the potential structural reason for top traders' influence on trade is explored via link prediction. We find that a group of European countries account for 80% of global importation and are the most influential traders and bridges; a group of Asian countries are among the top exporters with half of the global share; and European countries' high influence is due to their large number of trade partners instead of their trade volume. Above all, a high number of trade partners is more important than trade volume for countries seeking to be top traders. Finally, we discuss these results given the recent promising development of international PV trade.

Barriers on PV trade will impede global carbon mitigation and local pollutant emissions reduction

“…Existing PV product trade studies have mostly been conducted based on the UN Comtrade database, and few of these studies noted re-export and re-import problems in the database 22,28 .…”

“…Studies have been conducted varying from calculating the lifecycle emissions and emission reduction potential of PV products [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] to PV product trade patterns and structures 22 to the emissions embodied in the bilateral PV product trade 23 and to the environmental impacts of the PV product trade 13,14,24 . Studies have also been carried out in various countries [15][16][17][18][19][20][21]24 , concluded that PV power generation could indeed help to reduce carbon and local air pollutant emissions obviously.…”

“…Although PV power generation has nearly 'zero emissions' in its operation 15,16 , pollutant emissions cannot be ignored when considering the whole lifecycle of PV products--from ore mining, silicon and silicon wafer processing, and solar cell and PV panel producing 8,9,11,25 . With the development of international trade and production specialization 26,27 , studies have focused on the solar module trade and accounting for the embodied carbon 22,24,28 . There has been widespread worry that PV product production "migrates" and is concentrated in certain countries/regions forming "hot spots" or "pollution havens" 24 , while PV panels are imported and consumed by other countries/regions to generate clean electricity, which not only reduces carbon emissions but also helps to improve the local environment.…”

How to Promote International Competitiveness of China’s Renewable Energy Products? – Based on SNA Theory

“…However, there were few articles analyzing renewable energy products from the perspective of social networks. Guan et al analyzed the trade status of major trading countries by building an international photovoltaic product trade network from 2000 to 2014 [17]. Ji built a world trade competition network for photovoltaic products and analyzed the intensity and evolution of photovoltaic export trade competition in major countries [18].…”

Regional collaborative forecast of primary energy consumption in China, Japan and South Korea based on multi-source data combination

“…As primary energy plays an important role in economic development, countries need to timely adjust energy consumption forms to cope with market fluctuations [1]. Energy strategy [2], energy reserve [3], productivity [4] and geopolitics [3] are crucial for each country engaging in comprehensive energy cooperation. In particular, for primary energy with different strategic status and commodity characteristics, the consumption in different regions is also different, that is, a primary energy consumption directly reflects its strategic status.…”