No attempt to control for any other factors before producing an article with a causal claim right there in the title? Geographically, do deregulated states happen to be located in areas of the country with significantly more solar potential? Who knows! I read the whole article and don't even know which states are "deregulated" and which are "partly deregulated".
Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
131–140 of 187 posts
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that some domestic manufacturers will abuse labor and pollute, you will never have 100% compliance. However it is far easier to police things here then somewhere without our regulatory framework. If Nike could get away with child sweatshops in the US, why did they bother moving abroad? Sure, they want to roll back all those protections but we don't have to. And more to the point, why doesn't the US party that…
>Sure, they want to roll back all those protections but we don't have to. But we're going to. You know that's the deal. >And more to the point, why doesn't the US party that champions labor rights and environmental regulations want to move manufacturing back to the US? Both parties are strongly pro-business and pro-manufacturing[0], and the Democrats did campaign on reshoring just because it's a no-brainer, but they…
For a long time, basically since the passage of NAFTA there was a general sentiment that mfg. should go away.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/10/17/163074704/manu...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/manufacturing-jobs-are-...
Democrats just recently changed their stance based on Trump's win, which is great if it helps the avg. worker.
We need to figure out how to structure our economy to benefit everyone:
>And manufacturing in particular embodies something that seems to be disappearing in today’s economy: jobs with decent pay and benefits available to workers without a college degree. The average factory worker earns more than $25 an hour before overtime; the typical retail worker makes less than $18 an hour.
It's fun to look back at these articles talking about how retail is taking off....now all the big boxes are dying, we replaced storefronts with a few warehouses.
Sure, the amount of labor going into making something has shrunk but so has the amount of labor required to sell something. Honestly, it's not just going to be just an AI driven and automated manufacturing industry. Healthcare, education and everything else seems to be falling into the same dark spiral.
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#133CTRL+F 'Enron' 0 results. Don't really trust something advocating for deregulated energy markets to not mention the elephant in the room.
the big issue with enron was semi-fraudulent accounting, not market manipulation. the stuff they puleld in cali was pretty slimy but i don't think something nearly thirty years old needs mention. any more than it does if a company wants to use mark-to-market accounting.
Sorry, Enron was rigging brownouts to seek profit. How many people do you think these brownouts killed? That goes well beyond "pretty slimy."
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#134Deregulating a basic human need and leaving it to the 'market' to solve this. This sounds a lot like other privatization efforts of the past decades. In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized. I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government ca…
As the article says, > Deregulated markets, which might be better described as “differently regulated” markets, separate these concerns. Independent power producers (generators) build and sell electricity wholesale to Retail Electric Providers (REPs), who sell to households, while utilities manage the transmission and infrastructure. On the face of it this makes sense to me. Deregulation doesn't mean there are no reg…
No, only one part is subject to competitive forces (generation). The other two, transmission and distribution, are agreed by any rational party to be a textbook case of a natural monopoly and are subject to strict regulation for that reason.
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't afford to go to war with an industrialized nation whose energy is immensely cheaper than your own, nor with a nuclear-armed nation. Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off, so importing them now would increase your energy security, not decrease it. For EVs the situation is more complex because of potential backdoors in firmware, but PV modules do not have any firmwar…
I think you are misguided because of a true belief in "the system". The problem is systems often fail to handle bad-faith actors who intentionally abuse them. Absent a higher system, we lack good means to address this. But the system is not a moral good and we don't owe it to anyone or anything to maintain arbitrary rules when our enemies are using them to hamstring us and threaten our citizens, liberties, and way of…
I live in Argentina, so my belief in "the system" is that it's comprehensively rigged. Also, a friend of mine was raped by the police under the US-backed last Argentine dictatorship, so I'm not super enthusiastic about dictatorships like the PRC, nor about LatAm being inside the US's sphere of influence.
This dumping stuff is nonsense. If you investigate more deeply than reading PR, you'll come to the same conclusion. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43463872 for more details on that.
If "being china's bitch", as you put it, were the alternative to war, it would not be "a worse option than war", because the PRC has ICBMs and 600 nuclear warheads. War with China would mean every major US city and every Chinese city becoming a radioactive wasteland. There are people who would prefer that to some kind of unfavorable economic situation, but I do not think those people merit a place in public discourse.
What I'm advocating, however, is not that the US accept an unfavorable economic situation and give up autonomy and independence; it's that the US cease to force an unfavorable economic situation on itself by sabotaging its own energy supply, which is fundamental to both transportation and to all forms of heavy industry. The foreseeable energy future is solar, and US policy is built on wilful blindness to that fact, a blindness which will cripple its industry's capacity to compete with China over at least the next three decades.
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of tariffs, solar is still the cheapest energy source in the US and the fastest growing even in absolute terms. We shoudln't let China overproduce and dump excess solar productions in its own attempts to control the market. We're trying to not repeat the energy dependence on unfriendly foreign powers. We don't want the Chinese Solar Embargo of 2026.
We shouldn't let China overproduce and dump excess solar productions in its own attempts to control the market. I think that this misreads how the Chinese solar industry works. It's one of the less government-controlled industries in China. It's fiercely competitive, which leads to low prices, rapid change, and periodic bankruptcies. Chinese-made solar panels became popular for the same reason their T-shirts and micr…
>I also think that there's low risk of lock-in from buying Chinese solar products now.
It's not lock-in, it's price competitiveness of locally produced solar. If Chinese solar is half price, domestic industry won't exist. If relations with China further deteriorate, they may restrict access. If there was a war we'd be out a major source of energy production/growth.
Currently the US is expected to manufacture solar modules at least equal to solar installs last year.
Being able to maintain production if there was an embargo, we're seeing something like a 20% year over year growth of total installed solar.
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't afford to go to war with an industrialized nation whose energy is immensely cheaper than your own, nor with a nuclear-armed nation. Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off, so importing them now would increase your energy security, not decrease it. For EVs the situation is more complex because of potential backdoors in firmware, but PV modules do not have any firmwar…
> Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.
> Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.
They last for decades, and the resources (unlike with oil) to produce, repair, and rebuild them are readily available in the US (if through no other resources than recycling failed panels).
The biggest risk is that the US stops training engineers, scientists, and technicians who would be capable of doing that work.
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't afford to go to war with an industrialized nation whose energy is immensely cheaper than your own, nor with a nuclear-armed nation. Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off, so importing them now would increase your energy security, not decrease it. For EVs the situation is more complex because of potential backdoors in firmware, but PV modules do not have any firmwar…
> Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.
They are conventionally warranted for 20 years, but that's just a guarantee they won't lose more than 20% from their nominal capacity over that time period. Silicon PV (the kind that dominates the market currently) continues to produce after that, continuing to degrade, but more slowly than in the first decade after installation. Many of the PV panels produced in the 01970s still work today.
So embargoing or blockading PV exports to the US would be a threat that the US might start to produce less energy 20 or 30 years in the future. This is very different from the situation with oil, where the Strategic Petroleum Reserve contains 19 days of petroleum consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U....
20 years versus 19 days is a significant difference, I feel. 20 years would be long enough for a functioning country to develop a solar-module industry from scratch, though the US probably couldn't. Think about the state of the Chinese PV industry 20 years ago, for example.
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling out a rather destructive take with just harsh NO is pretty high on the the hierarchy of disagreement. If you refer to the "bitch" statement that is quoting the person I replied to .... Their own comment seems heavily concerned with "being a bitch" which implies deep insecurity or trauma on their part .... Pretty typical maladaptive coping mechanism... Are all these extra words to say the same thing I already…
It’s a crude term, sure, but sums up a potential future where total dependence for critical materials leads to one nation being able to do relatively whatever she wants while the other is stuck taking terms as given. If you’d prefer “highly disadvantaged diplomatic, economic, and security situation” I can say that, but this is an internet comment not a freaking Brookings Institute report. Calling me an insane jingois…
Please try to make HN comments more like a freaking Brookings Institute report instead of more like /b/ on 4chan. Doing the opposite fosters the kind of environment you claim to want to avoid, where people call you names instead of rebutting your claims with evidence.
Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
China's solar panels are cheap because the Chinese government is subsidizing solar panel production with the express purpose of destroying solar panel industries in other nations. Hence, many countries impose tariffs on Chinese solar panels. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/china-solar-ener...
More trustworthy link for the article: https://archive.fo/oD56w This is basically nonsense. Chinese solar panels are cheap because they are produced efficiently, with orders of magnitude less materials and energy than were required in 02012, when the US started imposing "anti-dumping" tariffs on them. I've read many of the US Department of Commerce filings on the topic attempting to argue that the current prices are…
Are they that far ahead with manufacturing improvements?
The NYT article you linked talked about them using cheap(polluting) coal power and cheap(slave labor) mineral inputs.