Solar After the 2008 Crash: Finding a New Normal

Jenny Chase

Chapter 12 in Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, 2019, pp 79-84 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: When the Spanish solar market hit its deadline in 2008, a global financial crisis was in full swing. The US subprime mortgage market collapsed in 2007, and the investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. The financial crisis was widely blamed for the crash in solar module prices, but as far as I can tell had little to do with it — the prices of physical modules (as opposed to the stock prices of companies) fell simply because supply grew faster than demand, as new factories came online. Annual new build volumes continued to hit a new record every year, and annual investment figures hardly saw a dent; the problem was a fundamental oversupply of every part of the solar value chain. The financial crisis almost certainly had a role in the fall in solar stock prices which made it more difficult for solar manufacturing companies to sell more shares and raise more money, but that was a secondary effect as most were not in an expansion phase anyway.

Keywords: Climate Change; Energy Economics; Solar Power; Renewable Resources; Sustainable Technology; Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G20 G30 Q01 Q40 Q43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9781786347404_0012 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9781786347404_0012 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:wschap:9781786347404_0012

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().