Dn the region of Montbéliard (Doubs), the historic cradle of Peugeot, we pop champagne for a Chinese. On Monday, November 18, the city signed the sale of 10 hectares of land to the solar panel manufacturer DAS Solar. Originally from Zhejiang, south of Shanghai, the young company intends to invest more than 100 million euros to set up a panel factory with a capacity of 3 gigawatts.
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It could directly employ more than 400 people. The match is therefore on, with competing projects from the companies Carbon, in Fos-sur-Mer (Bouches-du-Rhône), and Holosolis, in Moselle, to try to revive a French solar sector that was decimated in the early 2000s. by Chinese competition, but in a market that is now in full growth.
The Montbéliard region is rich in abandoned industrial wastelands. The one sold to DAS Solar had previously hosted factories of Peugeot, then of its equipment manufacturer Faurecia. Like a passing of the baton. The old French industry gives way to the young Chinese in the hope of learning. In the signed agreement appears, according to Les Echos from Tuesday, November 19, the obligation of technology transfer. As requested by the Chinese in the 1990s, when Europeans sought to open factories there. “We must have the modesty to admit that we have become an emerging country and that we must behave as such”recognizes the boss of a large public bank.
A question of know-how
Overtaken by the electric car and renewable energy revolution, Europe is struggling to catch up. The most spectacular example is that of the Swedish Northvolt, which aimed to become a global battery giant and benefited from the goodwill of the European sector. He managed to raise nearly 15 billion euros to set up his factories in Sweden, Germany and Canada. Alas, three years after the start of its first factory, production is still not there, neither in quantity nor in quality, according to its first customers, who are now turning their backs on it. The group is now on the verge of filing for bankruptcy.
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Northvolt probably underestimated the scale of the task and overestimated its ability to master in a short time a profession as difficult as that of electrochemistry, a major specialty of the South Koreans and the Chinese. The same goes for solar cells and panels. It is not a question of science, but of industrial know-how. Hence the need to learn from one's competitors, to return to what the economist Philippe Aghion calls “the technological frontier”where the best in the world do not nest.
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