Risen Energy has cut more than 60% of its total workforce over three years, with 220,000 photovoltaic practitioners leaving the industry regretfully. It is not advisable for the industry to resist the downward cycle by relying on layoffs.
Photovoltaic sector faces layoffs while energy storage sector suffers talent shortage, making it urgent to build channels for workforce transition.
Foresee Energy notes that recent reports from Energy Storage & Power Market show the total number of employees of Risen Energy has dropped from 15,228 at the end of 2023 to 5,516 at the end of 2025, with a net reduction of 9,712 people in two years, a decline of 63.78%. The number of production staff was cut from 9,290 to 2,490, and the number of technical personnel decreased from 2,059 to 974.
This is not a crisis for a single enterprise. According to statistics from Black Hawk Photovoltaic, 139 listed photovoltaic enterprises have cut a total of 220,414 employees; according to the statistical caliber of New Energy Data DataBM.com, the total number of employees of 92 enterprises has decreased by about 208,700 compared with 2023.
At the same time, the Boss Human Resources Report predicts that the talent gap in the energy storage industry will increase to 78,000 in 2026. Jobs in the photovoltaic sector are disappearing, while jobs in the energy storage sector are waiting for suitable candidates.
Losses are squeezing payrolls, and layoffs are spreading from production lines to R&D teams
The direct driving force of this round of layoffs is the widespread losses across the industry. According to the sorting out by Jiemian News, in the semi-annual reports of 13 mainstream photovoltaic enterprises, the total loss in the first half of the year reached 18.473 billion yuan. LONGi Green Energy lost 3.684 billion yuan, JinkoSolar and JA Solar Technology lost 3.076 billion yuan and 2.663 billion yuan respectively. Among them, LONGi's net cash flow from operating activities in the first half of the year was negative 5.818 billion yuan.
Capacity utilization is a hard constraint. Taking Risen Energy as an example, in the first half of 2026, the module output was 2688.19MW, the sales volume was 2984.66MW, the annual production capacity was 30GW, and the capacity utilization rate was about 17.92%. When the production line cannot maintain full load, depreciation and labor wages will only be allocated to fewer products.
Quite different from the past, the cutting edge of corporate layoffs began to move deeper in 2026. In 2024, companies mainly shut down factories with low operating rates and eliminated redundant positions, while in 2026, even R&D teams started to shrink.
It is reported that Tongwei Co., Ltd. added 97.04 million yuan of severance benefits in the first half of the year, LONGi Green Energy paid 75.06 million yuan, TCL Zhonghuan paid 58.24 million yuan, and the total of the three companies is about 215 million yuan. The remuneration of key management personnel of Tongwei Co., Ltd. dropped from 11.1083 million yuan to 6.9497 million yuan, a decrease of 37.43%.
In this round of layoffs, technical personnel are in the most awkward position. The photovoltaic industry still needs technological iteration, and technical routes such as BC, TOPCon and HJT are still in competition, but a single company can no longer afford to launch too many technical projects at the same time. Moreover, Risen Energy recognized 4.2052 million yuan of severance benefits in the first half of 2026, a decrease of about 73% compared with 15.7178 million yuan in the same period of 2025. Foresee Energy believes that the decline in severance benefits does not mean that the personnel situation is stable, but that the large-scale headcount reduction has entered the final adjustment stage.
Where have the laid-off workers gone and where can they go
Foresee Energy's sorting out shows that the laid-off employees are roughly divided into three categories at present.
Production line operators are the largest group. The number of production personnel of Risen Energy decreased by 6,800 in two years. The total number of employees of 40 main photovoltaic industrial chain enterprises in 2025 was 274,600, a sharp decrease of 195,700 compared with 2023, a decline of 41.61%. Some of these production workers have transferred to other manufacturing industries, some have returned to their hometowns to engage in distributed photovoltaic installation, and others are still waiting for job arrangements.
The flow of technical personnel and functional positions is more complicated. There is still demand for technical personnel in the photovoltaic industry, but fewer and more skilled talents are needed. Non-core positions such as administration and finance are facing more direct transformation pressure.
Energy storage is the most frequently mentioned direction for job transfer. China's new energy storage market size reached 186 billion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 45.2%. What the energy storage sector lacks most is not production line operation experience, but capabilities such as BMS algorithms, power electronics, and system architecture. An engineer who has worked on module production line processes for eight years is proficient in yield ramping of texturization, diffusion, coating, and screen printing. The recruitment party usually gives a vague answer about how much these experiences can be converted for the energy storage system integration position. Cell technology is not equal to cell wafer technology, and energy storage system integration requires power electronics and grid connection capabilities.
On the other hand, job transfer is not completely impossible, because the photovoltaic and energy storage sectors are highly compatible in power electronics, grid connection technologies, and communication protocols. Positions such as energy storage power station operation and maintenance on-duty staff have relatively friendly threshold. With the on-duty shift supervisor providing on-the-job training, employees with excellent performance can apply to become full on-duty staff after half a year.
Policies are promoting job transfer. The Ministry of Education has included "Intelligent Operation and Maintenance Technology for Energy Storage Materials and Equipment" in 27 newly added majors in 2026, and enrollment will start in 2027, but the talent cultivation cycle is 3 to 4 years. The gap of county-level photovoltaic development positions is also concentrated, with more than 18,000 vacancies in Shandong, Henan and Zhejiang provinces alone.
Layoffs are the easiest choice, but not necessarily the best one
Facing losses, layoffs are the most direct cost reduction method. In addition to leading enterprises such as Tongwei and LONGi that are clearly carrying out layoffs, many small and medium-sized enterprises are also downsizing. For example, in February 2026, many media reported that a photovoltaic enterprise in Jiangsu issued a layoff notice, and the economic compensation was calculated according to the minimum monthly wage standard of 2,660 yuan in Changzhou. The average monthly salary of the laid-off employees in the 12 months before dismissal was only 2,518.33 yuan, which was lower than the local minimum wage standard.
Many other enterprises choose to lay off employees in other ways. A photovoltaic factory in Anhui notified personnel related to the wafer business to take a 5-month vacation, during which only the minimum wage is paid with no allowances. For enterprises with all employees waiting for jobs, the living subsidy for waiting for jobs is paid at 70% of the local minimum wage standard starting from the second accounting cycle. Rotating rest system, waiting for jobs with minimum wage, transferring to remote bases, canceling welfare benefits, all these measures point to the same direction - not laying off employees directly, but forcing employees to resign voluntarily.
Foresee Energy believes that this practice can save compensation costs in the short term, but in the long run, the cost is that the industry's talent reserve is consumed. The "Renewable Energy and Employment - 2025 Annual Review" jointly released by the International Renewable Energy Agency and the International Labour Organization shows that the number of jobs in this field increased by only 2.3% in 2024 compared with 2023, reaching 16.6 million, and the growth rate slowed down significantly compared with previous years. The number of people employed in photovoltaic related industries in China exceeds 4.2 million, of which about 2 million jobs are concentrated in the manufacturing sector. The 2 million jobs at the manufacturing end will not return to the 2023 level, not because the industry is not growing, but because the automation level and unit output efficiency are systematically improving.
Each enterprise calculates its own short-term accounts, but no one calculates the overall talent account for the entire industry. 220,000 people have left the manufacturing sector, the 78,000 job gap in the energy storage sector cannot be filled, and the 18,000 county-level operation and maintenance positions cannot recruit enough people. What is missing in the middle is not demand, but transition channels.
What is more worth asking is whether it is an effective strategy for photovoltaic enterprises to resist the downward cycle through layoffs? From the perspective of a single enterprise's financial statement, reducing labor expenditure can indeed delay cash consumption. But from the perspective of the entire industry, the large number of laid-off workers are exactly the technical workers with production line experience, and it takes 3 to 5 years to rebuild such teams. When the next round of demand picks up, enterprises will find that the production lines are still there, but the people are gone.
Under the low operating rate, compressing non-core positions and allocating resources to HJT, energy storage and key technical teams is the common choice of leading photovoltaic enterprises. The problem is that no one makes career plans for the more than 5,000 laid-off employees.
The industry's demand for "human resources" has not disappeared, but the demand for "this type of personnel" has disappeared. The photovoltaic industry is transitioning from the labor-intensive expansion period to the technology-intensive mature period. What really needs to be answered is whether the industry can establish talent transition channels during the contraction period, instead of letting each laid-off employee bear the transformation cost alone. Who will build this channel and how to build it is more urgent than discussing when the industry will recover.