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Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

nytimes.com

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Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#111

Post by ameister14 »

lossolo wrote: post #100
mmarq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A flat that cost 500-600K in Berlin would be rented out at 1000€ a month, that can’t increase more than the rent control allows. A mortgage would cost 3 times as much. So you’d be better off renting and investing the deposit, the stamp duty, notary costs and the 2000€ you save each month in government bonds.

Are you sure about these numbers? As ROI doesn't make any sense to me in context of the new investments built solely for rent. How does it work?

average cost for an apartment in Berlin is apparently around 5.100/m2 and rent is around 11/m2, so back of the napkin math pretty much checks out

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#112

Post by usrusr »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #94
usrusr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happens, but it's far from the whole picture. When energy is cheap you grow a lot of low hanging fruit savings not taken that suddenly become worthwhile when prices rise. Market economy is ruthless about optimisation, and when a change from a wasteful process to a less wasteful process is even the tiniest bit more expensive to perform than just paying for the extra energy, then market economy dictates that it's…

> "at one point in the future energy price will rise anyways" That's a silly assumption, unless you're expecting technological progress to grind to a halt. Energy prices are dramatically cheaper than they were 100 years ago, when they were dramatically cheaper than they were 200 years ago.

Non-renewables are just that: not renewable. Discovering yet another deposit merely postpones the end, it does not change their finite nature. Will renewables eventually become cheaper than the last scraps of fossil fuel? Absolutely! Through both progress and supply quantities. But that's exactly what is happening here, "renewables before they were cool"

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#114

Post by lenerdenator »

guappa wrote: post #45
lenerdenator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> German politicians should have taken their energy security more seriously back in the 2010s. Energy security AND national security. It was insane to build an economy on natural gas from a country with a long history of imperialism and autocracy, but Germans did it anyways. To be fair, the US did much the same with China with regards to manufacturing. The US was begging its NATO allies across the Atlantic to have a…

The USA is not in a position to criticize… All of the computers are made abroad. I doubt banning Huawei will solve anything, if a foreign power has decided to inject malicious instructions into the hardware.

China spent the first 15 years it had with significant computing resources in-country using them to hack the rest of the world. Once you do that, there is no restoring trust, no matter how hard you try.

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#115

Post by balderdash »

fy20 wrote: post #11
balderdash wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you’re not comparing the same products, for example how much more should one pay to have a product not produced with slave labour?

I am in Lithuania (EU) and when I had solar panels installed on my house, I got them installed and manufactured by a local company - whose factory is less than 10 miles from my house. I got quotes from a few companies, and this was was more expensive, but it was only around €1000 (10%) more than the cheapest company which offered Chinese panels. I figured if I need to make a warranty claim in 20 years time, this comp…

Glad to hear it. On a home installation the solar module cost is a smaller percentage of the total bill right? So wasn’t the premium paid for the modules more percentage wise than 10% of the total bill? Separately people pay ~3-5x more for modules in the retail market than at utility scale so paying say 55c/w vs say 50c/w retail isn’t a huge deal, but for utility scale projects where Chinese modules are 20-30c/w paying 50c/w is totally untenable.

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#116

Post by 3seashells »

eigenspace wrote: post #36
throwaway220033 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats being an exemplary citizen but how does your electric car and cargo bike play role in Germany's manufacturing?

Presumably they were just giving an example. The huge spike in German energy costs absolutely did push manufacturers to find ways to be more energy efficient in a very similar way it pushed regular consumers to also be more conscious of their energy use.

[dead]

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#117

Post by roenxi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25
achates wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has also lost its lead in manufacturing during the same time period.

> US has also lost its lead in manufacturing during the same time period On a relative basis, yes. In absolute terms we are close to our pre-financial crisis peak [1]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRMNTO01USQ661N

Do you happen to know what "Total Manufacturing" means in practice? I can't figure out what that series is measuring. It seems to be OECD data of some sort, but it doesn't have enough context to interpret.

One of the problems with US manufacturing is that it can be equal by, say, amount of money spent but get much worse productivity than Asia. And I'd believe it is a sophisticated method that accounts for that somehow, but I want to check it.

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#118

Post by roenxi »

thelastgallon wrote: post #80
roenxi wrote: post #5

Germany's energy production is below 1970s levels and their per capita figures are in a grim state [0]. As with much of Europe, it makes for worrying reading. It would be extremely impressive if they can remain a manufacturing leader through this. If there is less energy, someone will have to use less energy. As far as I can tell that means either compromising living standards or giving up some heavy manufacturing. I…

> Germany's energy production is below 1970s levels and their per capita figures are in a grim state Two thirds of energy from fossil fuels is wasted[1,2]. Renewables don't have wasted heat. Germany has been going green for a while, energy production does not give us a full picture. From: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-en... "This is shown in the chart below. It plots global final energy de…

I thought that was the strongest point bought up so far, and the orders of magnitude do seem to check out. Although I'd note that Germany's electricity production has also drifted back to the 20th century and prices seem to be ~3x the USs and 5x China's so energy-related pressure still looks like a potential root cause to me.

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#119

Post by zhengiszen »

roenxi wrote: post #5

Germany's energy production is below 1970s levels and their per capita figures are in a grim state [0]. As with much of Europe, it makes for worrying reading. It would be extremely impressive if they can remain a manufacturing leader through this. If there is less energy, someone will have to use less energy. As far as I can tell that means either compromising living standards or giving up some heavy manufacturing. I…

They really did by letting the French continue the nuclear and by making gaz deal with Russia... But Russian-Ukrainian conflict reminded them that they are still an occupied country with no sovereignty.

Re: Germany's solar panel industry, once a leader, is getting squeezed

#120

Post by cko »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #78
mmarq wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people in Germany can't afford to buy an apartment Most people in Germany don’t buy the apartments they live in, because renting in Germany gives you more or less the same rights as owning a leasehold flat in the UK. If you really want to buy a flat, tax-wise it is more convenient to rent it out and rent another one to live in. In many cities there are rent control mechanisms that make renting extremely cheape…

Owning gives you the advantage of not flushing away a third of your income down the drain and instead owning something that's yours by the time you retire instead of paying your landlord's lease and then retiring in poverty as you won't be able to afford rent on your pension. Have you seen new rent prices right now? It's definitely not "extremely cheap". It's only extremely cheap for those in grandfathered contracts.

If I owned a flat free and clear with a low rental yield as in many German cities (like 2-3%), I would sell the place to someone and then rent it from that person, then invest the proceeds into stocks.

People are overly obsessed with home ownership and being free and clear as soon as possible so they blindly repeat adages like "paying the landlord's rent" and "flushing your money away" without running the numbers.

Would you buy an apartment in Taipei, where a $1M apartment rents for $1k a month? I'd gladly pay my landlord's mortgage in that case.

It all depends on interest rates, rent to price ratio, and opportunity cost.

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