‘Insanely cheap energy’: solar power continues to shock the world

Most of the difference is in business practices, in customer acquisition. Basically all the advertising and salespeople to push solar. Lack of uniform building codes, and highly disparate permitting processes also raise costs in the US. Utilities are also hugely inconsistent throughout the US, not varying city-to-city like permitting processes, but there are thousands of different utilities in the US each with different policies. And perhaps the biggest problem is utility policies that either eliminate or make feasible solar for homes. After a utility makes solar possible by allowing favorable interconnection policies, companies rush in attempting to take advantage of the new market. But when utility executives get enough lobbying power to make solar economically infeasible through unreasonable fees, it kills existing solar installers. So the only solar companies that survive are those with large reach across lots of geographies that also have massive marketing arms that can do big customer acquisition when there's a sudden window of favorable solar interconnection policy.

I don't think Wuxi is insignificant.

Wuxi has been a city for 2200 years, since London was a scattered group of Celtic-speaking villages. Even earlier, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the capital of the State of Wu, Meili, was probably in what is now Wuxi, though it may have been a few kilometers to the southeast in Suzhou. This is where the famous war of Wu against Chu began, a century after Romulus was said to have founded Rome, where the Etruscan kings still ruled. At that time, when Meili was half a millennium old —a century before Plato would found the Academy from which academia takes its name— Sun Tzu led the Wu army of King Helü to victory against Chu, making Wu one of the most important kingdoms of the Spring and Autumn Period, and making himself one of the best-selling and most influential writers in the 20th century, 2500 years later. Temples dating from the Wu period are still popular tourist attractions in Wuxi. It has been a major commercial center since before Charlemagne was born. In 1830, before two thirds of the population died in the Taiping Rebellion, Wuxi was half a million people, 4% of the population of the United States at the time.

Today, five million people live in Wuxi. It's one of the 100 biggest cities in the world, and 25% of China's microelectronics industry is in Wuxi; probably every electronic device in your house contains chips made in Wuxi.

Perhaps people think of Wuxi as "small" because it is part of the Shanghai metropolitan area. Shanghai proper has 24.5 million people, and has been one of the biggest seaports in the world for thousands of years — when Stonehenge was built, Shanghai was already at least a thousand years old. Wuxi is only half as old and five times smaller than Shanghai, and there are many ancient and enormous cities in the region, so by comparison Wuxi might seem small.

But most countries in the world do not even have one city as big as Wuxi. Wuxi is bigger than Berlin, Madrid, or Rome, or indeed any city in Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, or New Zealand. It's bigger than Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, or Philadelphia. In Turkey, only Istanbul and possibly Ankara are bigger than Wuxi; in Australia, only (greater) Sydney and (greater) Melbourne are Wuxi-sized. It's three times the size of Dallas, San Diego, Birmingham (England), or Munich. More people live in Wuxi than in Oregon, Uruguay, the country of Mongolia, Puerto Rico, Lithuania, Kentucky, Botswana, Iowa, Kazakhstan, Utah, or Qatar. Wuxi's population is triple Estonia's.

If you look at the first photo in https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/31029, the big black area in the middle is Lake Tai. As the label tells you, Suzhou is the cluster of light on its right (east) shore; Wuxi is the cluster of light on its north (top) shore.

Another significant aspect of the situation is that China has just been through 200 years of absolute hell — including the worst civil war in history, multiple foreign invasions and occupations (including 14 years of World War II), by far the worst famine in history (one with the dubious distinction of being self-inflicted, unlike the famines in India and Ireland), the Cultural Revolution, and the end of the Qing dynasty. China is now recovering. Chinese electrical production has doubled during the last decade. Wuxi 10 or 20 years ago is not the same as Wuxi today.

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Finally, I think the Guardian has an anti-Chinese agenda, which leads them to trivialize anything they can about China. Consider the subtitle: "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen, and no one saw it coming." But in fact, although people many countries contributed smarts to the problem, Chinese smarts are by far the most relevant here.

Also, some people did see it coming; https://dercuano.github.io/notes/solar-economics.html are my notes on the subject from 13 years ago, where I wasn't entirely sure what form cheap solar energy would take, but concluded that there were so many promising alternatives that one would surely be successful. I looked hard to find a cost factor that kept the prices of PV cells so high, and couldn't find one, and noted that the internal economics of the situation seemed to mandate rapid cost decreases. Though I didn't know it, Swanson had been presenting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson's_law at conferences sponsored by NREL and the like since at least 02004, so it wasn't just some eccentric in Buenos Aires taking notes on SEC reports and doing calculations—it was a credible calculation being presented at conferences.

It depends greatly on your setup but, unless you are running some crazy, completely off-grid, system with cheap batteries and cheap inverter, you can expect an inverter to last you longer than this. Most are rated for 10-15 years, with some rated for 25 year lifecycle.

As with many things, quality costs, but not all costly inverters are quality, so do your research before you buy.

The warranty for most residential solar inverters is around 10 years, though often prorated towards the end of that timeframe. 7 years does not sound crazy, though with good cooling and and decent quality it's probably a tad low.

And most of our lithium doesn't come from proper "reserves" but from what is categorized as "resources," which is several times the quantity of "reserves." I don't know how much lithium is out there but we've barely even begun looking and there's never been demand for much in the past.