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Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

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Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#141

Post by kragen »

colechristensen wrote: post #136
philipkglass wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

20% year over year growth would mean falling further and further behind China, which is closer to 50% lately. Bookmark this comment and check back in a year to see if China's installed PV capacity grew by more or less than 20% in 02024.

Current US industrial policy is vastly inadequate for bootstrapping a domestic solar industry to international competitiveness, and the US trade barriers against cheap Chinese EVs are ensmallening the future domestic electricity market. This is a problem, because that's where domestic manufacturers have to sell their product before hypothetically achieving low enough production costs to gain a foothold in export markets.

To be quantitative, the US only installed about 34GWp of PV last year https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/28/us-added-34-gw-of-pv-... and increased its manufacturing capacity from 14.1GWp yearly to 42.1GWp yearly https://seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight/. However, that's GWdc, and those 34GWac were actually 50GWdc. So US manufacturing capacity lags behind demand, as you'd expect given its inefficiency and consequent international uncompetitiveness.

Also, I want to point out that your idea that what companies in China should or shouldn't be allowed to produce or invest in is within the jurisdiction of the US government is a breathtaking level of central-economic-planning advocacy that even Stalin and Mao would never have admitted to. It's precisely the rejection of such central planning by Deng that permitted Mainland China to develop economically.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#142

Post by kragen »

themaninthedark wrote: post #140
kragen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, although the rest of the world is catching up, and manufacturers in many countries now sell solar modules at prices much lower than the prices that launched the "dumping" allegations in 02012.

As for coal power specifically, being polluting doesn't make it cheap; it's economically uncompetitive with both solar and wind, and in China specifically, the coal has to be imported from abroad, making it not just more expensive but also a national security risk.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#143

Post by mbrumlow »

Jtsummers wrote: post #137
mbrumlow wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Just pointing out that they are not forever. And the use of it in reasoning if flawed. We can but 20 years of oil too. It being a long period only lessons the affect not removes it.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#144

Post by themaninthedark »

kragen wrote: post #142
themaninthedark wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, although the rest of the world is catching up, and manufacturers in many countries now sell solar modules at prices much lower than the prices that launched the "dumping" allegations in 02012. As for coal power specifically, being polluting doesn't make it cheap; it's economically uncompetitive with both solar and wind, and in China specifically, the coal has to be imported from abroad, making it not just more e…

China has coal mines...I remember several disasters associated with them.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

>current large-scale coal mine capacity is 3.88 billion tons per year

However Wiki does say that it's use is uneconomical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

Being polluting does make it cheap. The pollution controls, filters etc add nothing to generating capacity and only add cost.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#145

Post by [deleted] »

mbrumlow wrote: post #143
Jtsummers wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Just pointing out that they are not forever. And the use of it in reasoning if flawed. We can but 20 years of oil too. It being a long period only lessons the affect not removes it.

[deleted]

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#146

Post by Jtsummers »

mbrumlow wrote: post #143
Jtsummers wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

Just pointing out that they are not forever. And the use of it in reasoning if flawed. We can but 20 years of oil too. It being a long period only lessons the affect not removes it.

> We can but [sic] 20 years of oil too.

The US annual oil demand costs around $500 billion (over 7 billion barrels used per year, but it's not all for energy). Since that does include other uses besides energy and energy demands are only increasing, it's still a useful baseline figure for estimating (because it's conservative, we'll likely need more in the future).

To acquire 20 years worth of our current demand would cost over $10 trillion (+ storage costs + future processing costs). Do you really think we can acquire 20 years worth of oil as easily as we can acquire solar panels? Panels which cost a fraction of that and don't require you to literally burn them to get energy, and instead can produce energy for decades with a little bit of maintenance (clean them, keep trees from growing over them).

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#147

Post by g-b-r »

tomrod wrote: post #105
kragen wrote: post #21

The most significant US regulations in the area aren't even mentioned in this article: the prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese solar modules and electric vehicles, which at least double the cost of solar panels and EVs in the US compared to much of the rest of the world. Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determ…

As a sidenote, I love that you reference 1973 as 01973. I suggest considering labeling even as 11973, based on some reasonable humanist-based information.[0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czgOWmtGVGs

As a sidenote, I hate it, can someone explain where does it come from?

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#148

Post by aussiegreenie »

mbrumlow wrote: post #130
kragen wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

I do not want to resort to Reddit-level insults but you are so misguided to imply you are trolling.

1) The Australian government is spending millions of dollars to ensure we can turn off excessive solar production to protect grid stability.

Every grid operator will do similar things when solar and wind reach 80% of the generation

2) Solar PV has an effective life of about 25 years and still produces about 75% of its nameplate capacity in 25 years.

If you are genuinely concerned about what the energy supply chain will look like in 25 years, you are either a fool or a liar or both.

Solar PV was invented at Bell Labs in 1954. Since then it has reduced in cost by more than 99.9%. And continues to fall in price.

To demonstrate how quickly solar can be deployed; Pakistan added 1/3 of its total generation capacity in 2024. That is over 17GW of solar in a poor and disorganised country.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#149

Post by piva00 »

piva00 wrote: post #117
dingnuts wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, the commentator is simply proposing actually responding to the imperialism of China by protecting US assets and national security instead of rolling over and taking it because of misguided principles about free trade and intellectual property that the CCP has undermined for forty years to arrive in a position where they can undercut us on price through human rights abuses. It is China that is imperialist and that…

> It is China that is imperialist and that has ruined the post cold war free trade world order. The US must respond or China will be the world hegemon. The USA is the current imperial power, go ask us born in South America how it felt to listen to stories on dictatorships brought on by the imperialism of the USA; or societies having to bend for the spread of Reagan's economics cancer dismantling any semblance of soci…

I meant Avro in my edit but can't edit the message anymore.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#150

Post by monadINtop »

kccqzy wrote: post #37
monadINtop wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And in what world is the incentive of cutting costs and price gouging - of necessities no less - aligned with the incentives of the vast majority of mankind who would just like energy, healthcare, housing, public infrastructure, etc. to be as affordable and high quality as possible.

The incentive of cutting costs directly leads to affordability.

No quite obviously cutting costs increases profit which goes into reinvestment to then generate more profit and so on. It has no relation to prices unless the business happens to be losing customers to competition which is unrelated. Prices are lowered only as much as it can increase the rate of profit. Increasing affordability past that point for the good of the consumer is strictly against the incentives of the business since it prevents the growth of capital and thereby hampers them in competition.

Also quantitatively cutting costs qualitatively looks like enshittification of goods and services in practice, and unlike in undergrad economics textbooks consumers rarely have recourse in the form of switching brands since basically all "markets" for necessities are oligopolies (thanks often to government contracts for public works in an increasingly privatized world, if not simply the natural global minimum of any market).

On a basic level the point of putting a commodity on the market is to sell it to the highest bidder. Why is this the preferred way to distribute necessities? It certainly "aligns" with one particular incentive - that of the seller - not that of most people. Doesn't everyone need access to healthcare, housing, energy, etc.? Are poor people to compete with people who can outspend them several times over for food and housing? As the cost of living continues to increase does it make sense to hand over an increasing portion of our wages for the same - or worse - standard of living?

If you want freedom of choice in what you consume and have the means to do so then go ahead and turn to a market to buy a penthouse or gourmet food or whatever. But why is it such an offense to the current hegemonic ideology to ensure that there is basic universal access to essential resources?

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