India wants to build its own solar industry from the ground up. But it still can't cut the cord from Chinese suppliers. That contradiction is now shutting down factories across the country.
Reuters reports that a shortage of domestically made solar cells has forced several panel manufacturers to halt operations entirely. Companies now face waits of up to eight months for local cells that were meant to replace Chinese imports.
Industry insiders warn this bottleneck threatens to derail India's 2030 solar power targets.
India wants solar independence. Chinese parts still call the shots.
A Third Of Factories Down
The numbers tell a stark story. Nearly a third of India's 140 small and medium-sized solar panel manufacturers have already stopped production, according to India's Solar Manufacturers Association.
Those idled plants account for 60% of the country's national manufacturing capacity. The remaining factories aren't faring much better. They've scaled back to running just once every three to four days.
Going local comes with a steep price tag right now. Manufacturers without their own cell production lines face six to eight month waits for domestic cells. That delay has pushed the cost of India-made panels to nearly double the price of panels built with Chinese cells.
Shailendra Shukla, chairman of manufacturer Icon Solar, put it bluntly. "We have suffered a lot due to the domestic cell unavailability for the past three months," he said. He expects his company's output to plunge from 3.2 gigawatts to roughly 1 gigawatt.
Mandate Meets Reality
Earlier this year, the Indian government started to force the issue. From June 1 onward, solar projects must use compliant domestically produced cells to cut reliance on imports. The policy backfired in practice. India's local cell production capacity simply couldn't keep up, leaving companies with plenty of module capacity but no cells to put in them.
The scale of the mismatch is striking. Indian firms have built roughly 200 gigawatts of solar panel manufacturing capacity. Solar cell capacity, by contrast, stands at just about 27 gigawatts, with actual operational output running even lower at 16 to 18 gigawatts.
Closing that gap won't happen overnight. Rajan Kalsotra, senior consultant at German research firm EUPD Research, estimates it could take India three to five years to build enough domestic cell capacity to match its module output.
Solar power reaches even India's temporary settlements.
A Supply Chain Still Made In China
India's photovoltaic industry has leaned on China's supply chain for years, and that dependence hasn't loosened. About 95% of India's solar cell imports come from China. Imports in the last fiscal year rose 37% year-on-year to roughly 1.86 billion US dollars.
Building an independent supply chain takes more than ambition. Solar cell factories require substantial capital, technological partnerships, and lengthy commissioning periods. China dominates the global market for solar manufacturing equipment and technology, and Indian firms say Beijing's export restrictions on related technology have made it even harder for India to expand its own capacity.
The clock is ticking on India's climate commitments. Indian solar companies warn that the cell shortage is driving up costs, delaying project construction, and could jeopardize the country's 2030 target of installing 500 gigawatts of non-fossil fuel energy capacity. Currently, India's non-fossil energy capacity stands at about 288 gigawatts, with solar accounting for roughly 29% of that total.
The human cost is mounting too. Industry insiders say Indian solar project costs could rise by about 35% until domestic cell capacity expands. Companies reliant on photovoltaic manufacturing are also facing employment pressures. In Gujarat state alone, module manufacturers lacking cell production capacity account for roughly 45,000 jobs.
Deep Throat
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The future belongs to artificial general intelligence (AGI). China and the United States are pursuing different strategies in the contest for global leadership.
But one US national security think tank wants to take the rivalry to an extreme. The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has gone so far as to suggest that Washington consider extreme measures to stop China from achieving AGI first.
CNAS released “Superpowers and AGI” report late last month.
Jacob Stokes, one of the report's authors and a former White House official, called on the US to prepare itself. He listed possible extreme measures, from diplomacy and espionage to cyberattacks and coercive steps. Among them: military strikes on Chinese data centers.
Stokes, one of the authors of the report urged extreme steps, even strikes on Chinese data centers.
CNAS is headquartered in Washington and was founded in 2007. It has long advised the US government on defense, Indo-Pacific and China strategy. Its lean is hawkish.
Late last month, CNAS released a report titled “Superpowers and AGI”. The document reeks of gunpowder. It argues that the race for AGI, and the technology's potential emergence, could profoundly affect US-China competition. It could also heighten the risk of military conflict or catastrophe on multiple fronts.
The Containment Checklist
To that end, the report urges US policymakers to act on several fronts. First, ensure that American resources and technology do not aid China's AI development. Second, establish AI-focused diplomatic channels with allies and with China, so that the potential emergence of AGI is placed on the agenda. Third, develop a technically sophisticated method to track the inputs into AGI and the key performance thresholds of frontier AI systems.
The list goes on. Washington should conduct scenario exercises testing when and how the US should intervene to halt China's AGI development. It should prepare to reverse-engineer or steal the technology should China obtain AGI first. And it should limit and contain the reach of authoritarian digital infrastructure.
The most extreme proposal of all is military strikes. The South China Morning Post reported on 4 September that Stokes, deputy director of CNAS's Indo-Pacific Security Program, addressed an online event on Thursday.
His message was blunt. The US Department of Defense, the National Security Agency and other agencies should begin assessing what intelligence would be needed to justify such operations. That would pave the way for the "hard action" to follow.
The Cold War Playbook
Stokes served as a national security staffer under former US president Barack Obama. In the report he unabashedly lays out a menu of what he calls "diplomatic, espionage, cyber and kinetic measures." Among them are military strikes on the data centers that train and run China's AGI systems. He even touts preventive strikes before China develops AGI at all.
Stokes goes so far as to compare the undertaking to the way "in a past era, policymakers would learn about nuclear weapons." His declared method is to "work backwards from the science to the policy implications."
Citing assessments by research outfit Epoch AI, the report notes that the US currently leads China in advanced AI models by only "months." But it warns that China could pull off an "unexpected technological breakthrough" in fields such as robotics and "embodied AI."
Citing research institute Epoch AI data, the report sees China pulling off surprise breakthroughs.
Notably, Stokes also concedes a gap on the American side. The US government and its intelligence agencies have "not been organised for espionage to gather technological secrets for decades."
"The Height of Recklessness"
Stokes' extreme remarks have drawn questioning within the United States itself. William Hartung, a senior arms and defense budget expert at the Washington-based non-profit Project On Government Oversight (POGO), publicly slammed the report as "the height of recklessness."
Hartung warned that any strike on Chinese data centers would "risk starting a shooting war between two nuclear-armed powers". Such a war could bring tragic consequences for all concerned.
China has consistently maintained that AI should be people-centered and that intelligence should serve the good. Military applications must remain under human control. Beijing opposes turning technological issues into bloc confrontation or weaponry.
Make no mistake: technological competition is no casus belli. When individual American politicians and think-tank figures reach for threats of "military strikes" and "espionage" at every turn, they gravely violate the basic norms of international relations. They also expose a dangerous bid to politicize and militarize technology.
