Longi Solar Panels

Longi Solar is a Chinese company that is a tier one manufacturer of solar panels. They only produce monosilicon panels and may be the largest monosilicon solar panel manufacturer globally.  Their panels come with a 10 year product warranty. Longi Solar’s Australian office can be reached for warranty support or assistance on 02 8484 5806.

Longi Solar Panel Production

Longi Solar was the world’s fastest growing solar manufacturer in 2016 and has continued to grow rapidly since.

In 2019, it shipped 7.394 GW of cells and modules, an increase of 23.43% over 2018. By the end of 2019, Longi reached 42GW of monocrystalline silicon wafer and 14 GW of mono panel production capabilities.

Longi shipped 2.5 gigawatts of silicon wafers in 2014, which are slices of silicon ingot before they are turned into solar cells.  2014 was also the year Longi stopped producing silicon ingots and wafers exclusively and expanding into solar panel manufacturing by buying Lerri Solar.

After acquiring Lerri Solar, which had been making solar panels since 2007, Longi continued to produce panels under the Lerri name until early in 2017 when the company rebranded as Longi Solar.  Longi may have held off on the rebranding to ensure solar panel reliability was up to par before associating the Longi name so closely with them.

From 2014 to 2016 Longi expanded rapidly.  Fortunately this success did not lead to them becoming arrogant and developing a Longi ‘tude.

Longi Headquarters

Longi is headquarted in Xian, or Xi’an; which located in Shaanxi Province, but Longi says on its website this city is located in the neighboring Shanxi Province.  Somehow the company confused Shaanxi and Shanxi when writing about themselves in a foreign language.  I can’t imagine how that happened.

Longi is headquartered in Xi’an rather than further south near Shanghai where the majority of the world’s solar panels are made because they began operations as a silicon manufacturer.  Monosilicon production requires a great deal of electrical energy, so they were founded in an area with access to cheap coal power.  Fortunately, China is taking steps to reduce their coal use and one of them is a massive build out of solar capacity. In March 2020, Longi committed to sourcing 100% renewables-based electricity across all its operations by 2028.

Local And Overseas Production

Longi has 9 factories in China, spread across Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Ningxia and Yunnan.

In addition to their Chinese factories, Longi expanded production overseas.  Longi constructed a factory in India with the ability of manufacturing 500 megawatts of solar panels annually.  The facilility is situated in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Sri City in Andhra Pradesh.  The factory employs 1,000 people, which is a significant number for a 500 megawatt plant these days, but as wages are lower in India compared to China, it’s not unusual to be hiring more staff than they would back on their home turf.

Longi has also purchased a facility in Malaysia capable of 500 MW of solar panel capacity a year . The plant will ship in silicon ingots, slice them into wafers, produce solar cells and panels, and then melt all the waste silicon to produce new ingots on site.

Longi’s Vertical Integration

As Longi produces silicon ingots, wafers, solar cells and solar panels, they are considered a vertically integrated company.  While this provides the company a secure supply of silicon, there is potential that by making the company larger, it becomes more cumbersome and less able to react to sudden changes in solar technology and the market.

Monosilicon = Efficient Panels

As monosilicon enables panels to be more efficient in converting sunlight to electricity than polysilicon, Longi Solar panels have reasonably high efficiencies. Their 60 cell panels, which are likely to be used on Australian rooftops, have efficiencies ranging from 17.4% to 20.3%.

Longi is a participant in China’s Top Runner Program, which is a government scheme with a goal of boosting the efficiency of Chinese solar panels.

Multiple Records Set

Longi has achieved a number of records for solar cell efficiency in the last few years, and this drive to achieve recognition for its research and development efforts is something that benefits us all. As one manufacturer sets a record, another breaks it – and the cycle goes on. While these are often just incremental improvements, these added up make for significant progress.

Longi Performance Warranty – Better Than Average

Most tier one solar panels at the lower end of the pricing range only guarantee around 80% of their originally rated power after 25 years.  But Longi promises their standard panels will still produce at least 83.1% of their original output after this time and their PERC panels will provide at 84.8%.