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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

#131

Post by helsinkiandrew »

phil21 wrote: post #104
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just you and your electric car - Germany has been the world leader in increasing energy efficiency for several decades - 35% reduction in housing and 12% in industry since 2000. I think the national target is a further 30% reduction by 2030. https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-trends-p...

What could Germany have accomplished otherwise if they had not focused on increasing efficiency? Efficiency in of itself is not a useful work product. To game theory it - if you had an unlimited source of literally free energy, no one would waste time or effort on gaining efficiency. They would be working on making new products and services. Every person or monetary unit working towards efficiency gains means those r…

> Efficiency in of itself is not a useful work product. To game theory it - if you had an unlimited source of literally free energy, no one would waste time or effort on gaining efficiency. They would be working on making new products and services.

But we don't have an unlimited source of free energy - energy efficiency has been a goal of much of the developed world since the 1970s, for example the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conservation_in_the_Uni...

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

#132

Post by lenerdenator »

guappa wrote: post #128
lenerdenator wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do we trust to buy every computer then?

There's at least some incentive for China to not place snooping gear in products made in their country by other nations' companies.

Let's say the factories that make MacBooks get infiltrated by Chinese intelligence and they somehow managed to put some sort of technology in the product that allowed for them to compromise it. Sooner or later US intelligence is going to find out, at which point someone in the US government is going to have a very stern talk with Tim Cook about terminating any and all business with their Chinese suppliers now.

This causes ripple effects as other countries drop Chinese suppliers, causing economic problems for the country. The CCP, for all of its faults, knows that it can't continue to piss on the basic rights of Chinese citizens if the economy goes south there. It's a careful balancing act of bread, circuses, and brutally repressive totalitarian single-party politics.

If you start buying Huawei infrastructure en masse, you lose that leverage over the Chinese to keep their snooping gear out of the stuff you buy from them.

Again, when the mainland Chinese developed any real computer-based telecommunications in their country between 2000 and 2010, the first thing they decided to do with it was start tearing into other countries' networks and infrastructure. They did this before even creating recognizable Chinese brand names for consumer devices. They used their chance at a first impression to brand themselves as state-backed black hats, and they're going to suffer from that until there's major reforms in the Chinese government.

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

#133

Post by AlchemistCamp »

usrusr wrote: post #112
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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"

Categorizing sources into "renewable" and "non-renewable" doesn't change the math.

Centuries ago, our primary power source was lumber. Later it was coal and then whales and then oil. In the future it will be solar panels and fission and then fusion. The energy output of 1kg of fuel for a fusion reactor is many orders of magnitude more than what can be captured from burning 1kg of lumber.

And it's not a matter of "discovering a deposit". Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the solar system and in the universe.

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

#134

Post by usrusr »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #133
usrusr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Categorizing sources into "renewable" and "non-renewable" doesn't change the math. Centuries ago, our primary power source was lumber. Later it was coal and then whales and then oil. In the future it will be solar panels and fission and then fusion. The energy output of 1kg of fuel for a fusion reactor is many orders of magnitude more than what can be captured from burning 1kg of lumber. And it's not a matter of "dis…

Hydrogen is a medium, not a source. In many ways it's closer to the copper in a wire than to the crude in a pipeline.

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

#135

Post by AlchemistCamp »

usrusr wrote: post #134
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Categorizing sources into "renewable" and "non-renewable" doesn't change the math. Centuries ago, our primary power source was lumber. Later it was coal and then whales and then oil. In the future it will be solar panels and fission and then fusion. The energy output of 1kg of fuel for a fusion reactor is many orders of magnitude more than what can be captured from burning 1kg of lumber. And it's not a matter of "dis…

Hydrogen is a medium, not a source. In many ways it's closer to the copper in a wire than to the crude in a pipeline.

To the best of my knowledge, hydrogen fusion is the source of well over 99% of all energy generated both in our solar system and galaxy.
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