“Solar manufacturing up 50%” may sound like an old headline, but in fact this didn’t happen in Q1 2022 – the industry’s overdrive started in Q2 2022. Depending on which supply chain element and which moment you choose to compare, the scale of the industry’s apparent growth in the past 12 months varies. If you compare wafer production in March 2023 to March 2022, it has increased by 100%. If you go by photovoltaic-grade glass production, citing only China’s figures from the Department of Raw Materials in the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, then the industry has grown by 83.6%, with 5.49 million tons produced from January to March. According to a statistical collation from SolarBe, with similar results…