This is not necessarily a move against renewables as a whole.
>"The duties are lower than the 35 percent rate the U.S. International Trade Commission recommended in October after finding that imported panels were harming American manufacturers. The idea behind the tariffs is to raise the costs of cheap imports, particularly from Asia, and level the playing field for those who manufacture the parts domestically."
This is largely in support of American manufacturing. Of course it will harm the solar industry through increased prices, but Trump here is balancing an interest in solar with an interest in American industry.
Because it’s easier to incentivize Renewable Energy than it would be to battle the oil giants.
I see it as a win for both sides. Dems get to put on show that they care about the planet. Trump gets to put on a show he’s saving the planet and American manufacturing.
Or because Trump and his campaign take huge money from the oil companies? It is a win-win for Trump, he can boast himself about protecting US jobs and interests of his money donors.
Acting as if it’s only Trump or even republicans taking oil money is short sighted.
Obama could’ve done the same? Actually he decided to lift a ban on Crude Oil exports. The oil from shale and fracking that flooded the markets in the past years.
> Actually he decided to lift a ban on Crude Oil exports. The oil from shale and fracking that flooded the markets in the past years.
Obama's admin was more tempered when it came to oil+gas+petrol+coal.
The admin increased exports, but it also restrained oil exploration in US waters (especially after Deepwater Horizon) and didn't open exploration to most of Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or just rubberstamp the Keystone XL pipeline (ironically the smaller Keystone pipeline had a fairly large spill the same week as the Trump admin approved the Keystone XL).
That's not to say that the Obama Admin was nearly as "anti-oil" as it was portrayed in conservative-biased news. They were remarkably accommodating when the cost-benefit analysis was positive for the country.
I don't see how the fact that they gave money to both major candidates is supposed to dispel the idea that they get favorable treatment because they try to buy favor. If anything, it supports the idea (since otherwise you'd expect them only to give to the side they liked better).
If you think pittance bribes from oil companies is enough to sway Trump, you're likely mistaken. Realistic valuations put him at around $2-3 billion, and a large majority of his campaign was self-funded or from small individual donors. No petrol donor will be able to discreetly donate more than he can make just having a portion of his wealth track the market.
There's a lot of things to be said about Trump and economic protectionism, but saying it's entirely fueled by donor pressure is oversimplifying the situation.
> and a large majority of his campaign was self-funded or from small individual donors.
Source, please? Given the absurd amount of corruption going on in the administration (i.e. the missing inaugural funds and Mar-a-lago vacations, to name just a tiny fraction) and Trump's own charities, I find the idea that he spent even a penny of his own money on his campaign laughable based on first principles. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary, other than his own patently unreliable rhetoric.
Maybe the idea is that the oil companies have to get in line behind all the other awful people paying exorbitant prices to have their entire delegations stay at Trump hotels and resorts? "I'm making so much money from this new classy phenomenal corruption that everyone is talking about, that I can't even be arsed to worry about that other corruption that the Washington insiders like!"
"Trump received about $239 million from donors who gave less than $200 in total. That amounts to 69 percent of the Trump campaign’s individual contributions;
Hillary Clinton received about $137 million from $200-or-under donors. That made up 22 percent of the campaign’s individual contributions;"
"President-elect Donald Trump didn't need $100 million of his money to win the White House in the end.
Trump contributed another $10 million to his presidential campaign in the closing days of the election, bringing his total investment in the race to $66.1 million, new filings confirm."
According to [1], Donald Trump did not make a single contribution to his own campaign except in the form of loans (based on my limited understanding of how the FEC reports this stuff, cross referenced against a candidates' filings who I know for certain loaned their own money to their campaign). Given that his campaign machinery started fundraising for 2020 the day after his inauguration, I feel that it is highly disingenuous to claim that those loans were in any way true political contributions.
Everyone is subsidizing fossil fuel production. Most countries agreed a few years ago that they were doing so and promised to stop, but little progress has been made on that.
This is an interesting move strategically. By making US-based solar panel manufacturers artificially more competitive, this tariff will allow them to develop in-house expertise and reduce dependency on China for the manufacturing stage of the supply chain.
If solar eventually becomes an important source of power, the US would not want to be wholly reliant on a geopolitical rival for manufacturing expertise. This could thus be construed as a vote for the long-term dominance of solar as an energy source.
While this is possibly true, this is also the most wishful of interpretations for the Trump administrations actions. It's much simpler and more likely to interpret the action as anti-solar & renewable, and pro fossil fuel.
Unless it's also backed up with added incentives to manufacture solar in country. I predict that won't happen, and even if it did new plants of any significance would be 5-10 years out and in the meantime all we've done is shot ourselves in the foot.
If he wanted to be true anti-solar, he'd work on killing the ITC (tax credit) that people are using to offset the cost of solar today (though it will fully disappear in ~4 years at the current schedule).
Before the final turns of the tax bill, I think the PTC solar credit was on the chopping block in the senate version. I suspect the ITC is temporarily protected by needing some extended regulatory process timeline to kill as early. I'm no tax expert but I recall reading that the PTC is more oriented to commercial solar producers and ITC residential.
I suspect the only real hold back of the administration is that it is understaffed to fully attack all of the solar programs effectively.
Chinese solar panels are already artificially more competitive because of the Chinese government's policies, this is just evening the playing field.
It's already clear that solar is only getting cheaper and more viable globally, this is a long term vote for maintaining our national security by guaranteeing that an entire industry can compete with foreign companies that are subsidized by their governments.
Fascinating to see how people with access to the internet fail to grasp basic concepts of sovereignty that were obvious to leaders that lived thousands of years ago.
Just because it happened for a long time doesn't mean it is necessarily right, moral, or just.
This fallacious argument was used to retain slavery in the US for 50+ years after it was abolished in Britain/UK. It was used to justify restricting voting to white, landholding men and banning interracial marriage for centuries.
And if I were to use one of the president's favorite fallacies against himself[2], "what about" all of the places in the world where we reject local sovereignty for the supposed "national security" of the USA? I would argue that all of the problems the US has had with Iran since the late 1960s have to do with the USA's lack of respect for Iranian sovereignty in the 1950s.
Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that you could fight a war without weaponry, food, logistics, manpower, or any of the resources needed to support those aforementioned things - like, you know, electricity or electrical generation equipment. I also didn't know that you could move all your manufacturing from a foreign country to your own shores at the blink of an eye when a war breaks out, nor that violent conflict stopped being a thing within human civilization.
It's not an appeal to tradition to tell someone to predict the motion of a slow moving football with Newtonian mechanics.
There's not much balance - there are tons of people working to install solar panels, and very few producing them. He's harming the former and probably won't do much for the latter, long term. Not to mention people purchasing the things, and, while we're at it, the environment, because solar is by and large a lot better than many alternatives.
The correct response when someone who is sort of a competitor is selling you stuff below cost is probably to buy lots and lots of it.
Yep, a better approach would have been to enforce a labelling standard for the efficiency of the panels, furthering the cause of commodifying them. Then when the dumpers finally jack up the price (their long term strategy), people just switch suppliers.
> There's not much balance - there are tons of people working to install solar panels, and very few producing them. He's harming the former and probably won't do much for the latter, long term.
Except that quite a few of the cheaper Chinese-made solar panels have shorter lifetimes than the American-made ones did.
Consequently, installers have started getting burned because they are getting warranty claims much sooner than they should be. And, of course, the supplier of the Chinese panels is long gone. And most of the American suppliers have been driven out of business by the cheaper prices--which means the installers can't switch to more reliable panels.
Now, do I think Trump thought about any of this? Not even slightly.
However, because solar panels are durable goods (or perhaps you prefer "capital expense") the calculus is a bit more complicated than just "cheaper is gooder".
In this instance, I knew a couple people who did solar installation businesses early on. They did very nicely with the uptick in business, but then sold out.
All of them specifically cited the Chinese flood with causing them to cash out.
They weren't prescient enough to predict the drop in actual reliability, but they could see very quickly that they were going to be the ones holding the bag on warranty claims with Chinese suppliers. And, if they didn't use Chinese suppliers, they couldn't compete on price. So, they just got out.
The problem is that the US's comparative advantage over China will surely be solar services (installation, maintenance, support) rather than raw hardware manufacturing. And the solar service industry is hurt by tariffs on Chinese panels.
Why can't it be solar manufacturing as well? The US has cheaper AND cleaner electricity than China and our engineering knowledge is among the best in the world.
Solar Fabrication plants are being made in the USA, and from my understanding, we have higher-tech panels which reach higher levels of efficiency. If the solar manufacturing industry gets a boost in the US, then we can likely make them cheaper too, due to the scaling of mass production.
China has to clean up their coal power plants though, they have a lot of them and need the power they produce. They consume ~5x the coal that the US consumes:
For a tariff that hurts one industry but helps another, it's comparative advantage, not just advantage, that is relevant. (Even if country A is better at making both product X and product Y than country B, introducing trade between A and B can result in manufacturing of Y migrating to country B.)
There is a gazillion other imports that can be targeted with a tax. The most important thing for solar is to expand adoption by keeping costs low. Solar is such a small industry that it will have zero impact on American manufacturing overall. This tax will only raise costs of solar without doing anything for domestic manufacturing
Most solar jobs are in solar install, which it will impact adversely. Solar manufacturing will see an increase, but it is mostly capital, not labor, intensive.
It could still make sense but I haven't seen a lot of the full rationale.
And it's likely to inversely impact US solar installations as it raises the price to install them in the USA.
Also note that unless this is done within the WTO framework, it is likely to start/escalate (depending on your interpretation of previous events) a "trade war" (arms race of tariffs) which ultimately hurts the US consumer.
It will have zero effect on US manufacturing in 2018. When photovoltaic panels become the source of the majority of electrical power in the mid-2020s, it will have an enormous effect on US manufacturing.
Also, it's arguably good for the long-term health of renewable energy as a whole, since China would presumably want to turn a nice big profit on their investment once they'd driven all the other manufacturers out of business and the expertise to actually do so had been lost elsewhere.
Clothing manufacturing is labour-intensive, relatively low tech, and just hops countries when labour gets more expensive in one place. Solar panels manufacturing has none of those properties. The general reckoning is that the Chinese government is subsidising local manufacturers, once the competitors close down and stop the expertise required to set up manufacturing elsewhere will decay and be lost and they'll have everyone over a barrel, and competing on cost of labour is irrelevant since it's such a small component of the cost.
A significant proportion of clothing production has moved to places like Bangladesh and Thailand (as labour costs in China rose over the last decade), and I'd wager that maintains the pressure on China to keep their prices low and not be able to gouge now that American manufacturers are mostly out of the picture.
Solar panel manufacturers cried foul while China simply out-managed the US players on the supply chain, so the US slapped tariffs on Chinese finished panels. China says, ok, so that's how you want it, and then they slap tariffs on cheap US-manufactured polysilicon. Most Americans (and sadly, most American politicians) don't know that up until recently those cheap Chinese solar panels started life as gravel, coal, and wood chips in America's rust belt. And jobs. Well, not anymore. South Korea, not near as foolish as the Obama administration, and not subject to the same high retaliatory tariffs, is now taking over the lead position in polysilicon. They didn't even say thanks.
Let's tour a polysilicon plant near Moses Lake, WA. Whoops. Closed down a few years ago when they couldn't compete with other countries for China's voracious polysilicon appetite. Hemlock Semiconductor, once the largest polysilicon manufacturer in the world, is hemorrhaging jobs left and right in Michigan. Both Hemlock and Wacker announced huge new polysilicon plants in Tennessee, investing billions, then mothballing them before they hit production because Uncle Sam suckerpunched the US polysilicon industry by playing anticompetitive with the US solar panel industry.
This made sense to an extent when the Democrats were in charge, because US solar panel factories were in blue voting areas and US polysilicon factories and suppliers were in red voting areas. Now it's simple pandering and incompetence.
Be careful with labeling it "American manufacturing". We've lost our worldwide leadership position and while we may buy American more at home, the rest of the world is moving on without our dominance.
I agree about 90%. The Wacker plant in Tennessee was actually completed and is currently operating, though. There is excess capacity for high-quality, low-cost polysilicon in the US to be soaked up if some more American wafer/cell facilities are developed (since the product can't go to China any more).
And US based cell manufacturing may indeed grow; Tesla is one driver, and JinkoSolar might be the next in line:
I have a little hope that this might also finally get Hanwha Q Cells and 1366 Technologies to launch a full-scale manufacturing partnership. I really like what 1366 has invented but if they wait years more to go industrial-scale they'll get their cost advantages erased by continued incremental improvements in traditional wafering.
These tariffs are not going to make American solar manufacturing dominate the global solar market. It might end up like with foreign automobile trade wars in the 1980s -- factories owned by overseas companies, but actual manufacturing operations in the US.
I'd prefer if we didn't go through several years of artificially elevated prices from these tariffs in the first place, but I think there's a decent chance it will actually lead to new American factories for cells and modules. Those plants will need to be bigger scale than past American facilities if they don't want to die as soon as the tariffs expire. Suniva's biggest problem IMO is that they were trying to manufacture in America at ~5% the scale of globally competitive manufacturers. They were unprofitable so they didn't scale up, and they didn't scale up because they were unprofitable.
> This made sense to an extent when the Democrats were in charge, because US solar panel factories were in blue voting areas and US polysilicon factories and suppliers were in red voting areas. Now it's simple pandering and incompetence.
I don't follow. Don't both scenarios wreak of pandering and incompetence?
I think this is the right response. Throughout history, you see that when countries preserve their manufacturing, their economy, as a whole does better. We've seen it with the rise of China over the past few decades, isolationist Japan during their industrial revolution, and even America with their industrial revolution.
Sounds similar to what Europe did. Europe added a 47% anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariff on Chinese solar panels years ago because Chinese manufacturers were selling them below cost. Many commentators have pointed out China aggressively subsidized their solar industry in an effort to starve foreign competition and dominate the global market. Looking back it seems like their effort has been rather successful. Two-thirds of the world's solar panel production capacity is now controlled by China.
Anyone got trends or articles on how that affected solar adoption in Europe? I presume downward pressure but was EU-based manufacturing able to close some of the price gap or were there other forces that helped cushion the blow?
One wonders if Solyndra would have become such a political controversy if it hadn't been such a trainwreck as a business? Some might say that any firm that receives such gigantic government support will have similarly poor results, but at least Tesla seems a pretty good counterexample.
And it was a very stupid thing to do, and I say that as an European. If the Chinese Government and its citizens want to subsidize clean energy production in Europe by selling us subsidized solar panels why should we say no? A similar question was posed by Jean-Baptiste Say about 200 years ago end since then no protectionist politicians were able to come up with a valid answer, they just go "by their instinct" or "it's best for our home industry that we behave this way", both answers that don't stand on any solid rational grounds.
Because it destroys the local industry which you will need at some point.
As simple example: the British supported the German chemicals industry prior to WWI.
At the start of WWI, the money the British spent had been turned into German chemical expertise. This lead to the development of the Haber process, poison gas, and generally making Germany a powerhouse in chemicals in the same way Britain was in mechanical manufacturing.
If a tariff had been put in place on German imports to Britain the German chemical industry would have been much smaller, with much less capability and WWI would have finished in 6 months because Germany would have run out of nitric acid for their explosives.
Are you saying it's better to keep underdeveloped countries technologically disadvantaged in case your own country worries they're becoming too powerful and so starts a war with them to keep them underdeveloped?
Another way to stop wars is to accept that somebody else is more economically productive and let the whole world benefit from that instead of trying to destroy it.
Protectionist politicians have always had an answer.
* Manufacturing them at home is better for local workers and provides a straightforward path for dispaced workers from other plant work.
* Trying to compete on even terms with what is essentially slave labor overseas drags us all down.
* There is value in economic independence, especially when you're importing from a fairweather ally. You don't want to wipe out a local industry that you might need to lean on someday.
The reasons for having tarriffs are apparently obvious to everyone except economists.
> If the Chinese Government and its citizens want to subsidize clean energy production in Europe by selling us subsidized solar panels why should we say no?
Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost. I don't want a dictatorship like China having the massive amount of leverage it already has. China has brought European solar, steel and electronics production to its knees by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.
Especially the stranglehold China has over the West when it comes to electronics will bite the West more sooner than later.
By the way, China is doing a similar thing to Africa: with all the money the West gave to them for cheap electronics they're building (and thus taking operational control) rail and road infrastructure.
From Chinese perspective it's the perfect ultra long game... the rest of the world is in for a massive shock once they run afoul of Chinese goals wherever and whenever that might be.
Not to be inflammatory, but are you stating that building rail and road infrastructure is morally worse than European actions on that continent (as recently as our own lifetimes)? Just seeking clarification.
> but are you stating that building rail and road infrastructure is morally worse than European actions on that continent
No, and that's why I said "long game". For now, of course, African countries selling themselves out to China will profit - but the countries are, basically, binding their future on the goodwill of China. Just imagine the countries decide one day that they're done with cheap low quality China crap, that they want to incentivize local production or that they want to show solidarity with Tibet or Taiwan... say goodbye to your traffic infrastructure, that will be the Chinese response.
The West made Africa totally dependent on mitumba (cheap second-hand clothing that all but destroyed local textile industry) and other foreign aid (after all, Africa is a nice dumping ground for overproduced European milk and other food - do "something good" and keep European prices high at the same time), and the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.
I'm not sure how you're proposing that would happen. Like ripping up roads? Or like, not renewing a contract for future repairs? And would that be different from the abandoned projects from NGO's?
> the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.
I think there's some projection here... Although I grew up in the U.S., I've visited relatives frequently enough to come at this with a different perspective.
In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.
In American culture, I've heard it said that no two countries that both have a McDonalds would go to war with one another. So I don't think this is really so different.
> cheap low quality China crap
um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias. A lot of high quality products come out of China these days, and the last time I visited (in 2017), Shanghai seemed way more high tech than the SF Bay Area. One area in which there is a lack of talent is in brand marketing, and I'll explain what the problem is with two scenarios:
1) U.S. brand wants to get a particular product made. Gets quotes from X suppliers. Chooses the lowest cost estimate, which happens to cut corners, reinforcing the low image of Chinese exports.
2) Chinese manufacturers release their own products into a Chinese market. Manufacturers compete against each other for consumer preference, and high quality products are rewarded. That's where the good stuff is. Problem is, these companies don't tend to have a lot of in-house marketing talent for making the right kind of ads for the West, despite having lots of technical / manufacturing / design expertise.
> I'm not sure how you're proposing that would happen.
One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching. In case of conflict, forbid the personnel from working, order the personnel back home - or, in severe cases, to activate a hidden killswitch on the IT equipment (which can be done even from remote). A railroad network without a working dispatch is useless, dito for airports. In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers the unspoken threat alone is enough to coerce any country into doing what China wants.
> In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.
Indeed, indeed - and exactly this is what makes me afraid. Who is going to oppose China when they try to annex Taiwan for good? I'd be surprised if the US actually follows through on their decades of pledges to Taiwan. Or when they will turn into that massive monster of a surveillance state enabled by modern technology? When everyone has ties to China, China has leverage. (Just as the US has, yes, but at least the US are a democracy and bound to human rights at their core.)
> um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias.
Combination of both, I'd say - the "conscious bias" backed by countless stories of faked high-quality Western products ending up even in legitimate supply chains and sometimes endangering lives.
> backed by countless stories of faked high-quality Western products ending up even in legitimate supply chains
One privilege of starting a company in the U.S. is that people don't automatically assume your business practices are similar to Uber's, or Exxon, or pharma bro. And conversations about your products aren't derailed by 10-things-I-hate-about-(country) (e.g., was there another drone strike on a wedding?).
The problem is that whenever a Chinese company does good things, is completely reasonable, makes great progress, which is 99.99% of the time, it is either: 1) not covered because it's not news, or 2) somehow spun into OMG-China-is-ahead fear-mongering.
Why does this happen? China-bashing gets you eyeballs. As an acquaintance of mine has mentioned to me, she gets requests from Western journalists of OMG-Asian-guys-are-sexist article quotes all the time. When she wants to tell them the truth, they no longer want to get her quote. There's an army of those writers and they're all full time. It's their job to tell you how nice it is here and terrible over there even when they're not giving you an accurate impression.
China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.
Nefarious plans to control the world? China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers. It is the crucial tendency towards commerce over war that has caused the past couple centuries of turmoil.
Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution? How does China measure up to that?
> One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching... In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers...
I've only met a few Chinese entrepreneurs who work in Africa, so my insight here will be limited in scope, but that's better than entirely theoretical.
These are just ordinary people -- I mean, they're adventurous enough to venture out and build a company, find product-market-fit, whether that's selling cell phones in South Africa or lingerie in Egypt. The notion that they are secretly at the beck-and-call of a shadowy government organization as opposed to entrepreneurs eking out a profit doesn't ring true. As much as that's not a researched scientific opinion, I can say that your assessment bears no resemblance to the folks I've gotten to know.
They have more in common with the Chinese diaspora, the engineers, the doctors and lawyers, the parental generation of restauranteurs and laundry shop owners, than some shadowy conspiracy to hold some country's infrastructure hostage for military reasons.
The Africa that they describe to me is so different from the one I see in movies like Black Hawk Down. They talk about every shortcoming as a potential business opportunity, not as a derogatory way to judge the country or continent. They talk about the impact of gender roles being an inhibitory force on GDP growth, and how frustrating / unexpected it is for women to quit a manufacturing job when they get married....
> One privilege of starting a company in the U.S. is that people don't automatically assume your business practices are similar to Uber's, or Exxon, or pharma bro.
Well anything with "disruption" in the name certainly will be assumed to follow business practices similar to Uber - they (and AirBnB) poisoned the well pretty much with their blatant disregard for any kind of law. For the other part, I fully agree with you - and hell there should be way more discussions on drone strikes.
> China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.
I agree that China has done massive leaps in economic terms - but not so on the human-rights part... and that's where much of the progress that has been made actually comes from: debts in terms of ecology disasters and debts in human rights (as shown e.g. by the suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country).
> China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers.
Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power. China has learned there from the Soviet Union which was dragged into bankruptcy by trying to keep up with the US in military terms... today all you need is economic power. China (and to a certain extent the Arabian countries) have total leverage over the West, given the dependence of Western civilizations on cheap oil and China as a production house.
> Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution?
None for #1, and "warmongering" is a bit of an understatement for #2.
> How does China measure up to that?
On this part: very well indeed. What angers me is that the Chinese leadership does not have a tiny dent of respect for human rights (e.g. Tibet, but especially their desire to be a state in total control over their citizenry). Today's China simply has different focus on where they want to ignore any progress in human rights.
They may have made missteps along the way, but if Flint, Michigan or Puerto Rico were in China, they'd both be fixed by now... Though hypotheticals are unhelpful, I know.
> suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country
Bashing Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) is often done in the same vein as China-bashing. Even before the suicide nets, the suicide rates were lower than the population at large. It's just that when you have a large enough population working at the same company, any number seems like a lot. Even without accounting for the suicide clustering effect, the rate was lower than similar-age populations at universities. After the nets went up, the suicide rate became almost negligible, similar to the prevention methods installed at the Golden Gate bridge.
> Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power.
Until someone fear-mongers you into a plausible enemy. And then you're screwed. Prepare for another century of bloodletting? (Shudders.)
> How does China measure up to that? > ignore any progress in human rights
A lot of the progress simply doesn't get reported in the West because it's not China-bashing enough to get eyeballs. There is this popular perception that freedom of assembly doesn't exist or that all protests get cracked down on. In recent memory, there was a strike of factory workers in Beijing and Shanghai, and it resulted in better working conditions and a higher minimum wage. There's lots of progress, but we just don't hear about it here. You should have seen the state of human rights during my grandparents' time when the KMT (the political party that self-exiled to Taiwan and was the official China internationally for a generation) was in charge.
I'm glad we live in modern times and not those times.
It appears to be popular with racists (at least going by the YouTube comments) because the middle-class Chinese engineers are needing to cope with very poor tribal workers who are not quite on board with the concept of the 9-5 culture but I felt the film itself humanised all sides and I was particularly touched by one scene where the engineers try to decide what to do about a worker who has damaged some bit of equipment that he wouldn't be able to afford to repair.
Generally made me feel good about the future of humanity.
No sub-saharan African country except South Africa has really stood on its own feet and been long term successful by modern standards. It's hard to say they would have done any better without colonialism or in the future without Chinese infrastructure. These might all be good things, despite the dependence they create.
> Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost
1. This assumes that the way we build solar panels (or whatever) never changes. We lost a lot of steel-making knowledge in the early 20th century. Of course, all that "expertise" was replaced by machines, so it was mostly a loss of obsolete knowledge.
2. The solution is to pocket a fraction of the savings and keep that in your back pocket to maintain a teaching/research corps and to ramp up internal expertise when/if the subsidies stop flowing. Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.
> 1. This assumes that the way we build solar panels (or whatever) never changes.
Yeah but the Chinese basically took the European process, scaled it up and dumped the prices by using extremely low cost labor and massive state subsidies both at construction of the plants and at selling the product. There's no invention there, only the aim of totally destroying the competition. The only inventions happening are in research labs - and as there are no more notable fabs left in Europe or the US, that research will be applied in China. Our taxes basically funding our continued downfall...
> Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.
The only country which ever had this is Norway with its ultra massive oil fund. The Arabian countries are playing catch-up there with their recent investments but... well... building a fully air conditioned soccer stadium right in the midst of a hot desert isn't exactly a wise (or environment friendly) investment, much less a dozen of them. In addition, engaging in more-or-less pointless turf and proxy wars all over Arabia (and parts of Northern Africa too) are a totally unneeded drain on their resources.
A common bias amongst Westerners who have never visited China. Actually, a lot of "home-grown" innovation happens in China, but is not really covered by Western media. You don't get double digit GDP growth without research into R&D across a broad range of sectors.
The solar panels that were produced a decade ago are also not as efficient as the ones produced today, and are productized in very different ways. For instance, light-weight solar panel kits that include a battery pack and LED lighting have a very high product-market-fit for ethnic Mongolian nomads (who follow their herds) and sell like hotcakes over there. You can get another add-on kit for charging your smartphone.
> A common bias amongst Westerners who have never visited China
I meant this sentence in direct reference to what happened with solar panel productions (because scaling and dumping in an extremely short timeframe was what happened and broke the neck of European solar).
I know that China has a massive ecosystem of invention (evidenced e.g. by the "gongkai" reports by Andrew Huang), I didn't want to laugh that down - sorry if it came across that way.
>Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost.
Is your assumption here that no non-europeans (including the Chinese) have contributed to solar research?
>by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.
You will need to provide massive objective evidence (i.e. not 2-3 links from googling "china solar" ) before anyone believes that giant assertion. Personally, I neither want a $5000 made in USA iPhone or a $99 bottom of the barrel chiPhone, but YMMV.
> You will need to provide massive objective evidence (i.e. not 2-3 links from googling "china solar" ) before anyone believes that giant assertion.
* "slavery-backed price dumping": There have been more than enough reports on the gruesome working conditions in Chinese factories. They are so widespread and notorious, they got dedicated their own Simpsons "couch gag" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEki-IBdop8). And yes, I consider this dumping - because a company that operates to Western working conditions has no way of competition against people with 80-hour workweeks, armies of children and adhering to safety protocols.
Your assertion - "China has brought European solar, steel and electronics production to its knees" via X,Y,Z is a very broad assertion. Your evidence for that is merely circumstantial. You expect the reader to connect the dots with the underlying subtext of "well, what else could this mean". Sorry, but this is not a serious way to put forth such an argument. Granted, I too, realistically cant expect a PhD dissertation in a HN comment, but then again, I'm not the one putting forth that argument.
You literally cannot have an effective national security apparatus without massive amounts of protectionist economic policy that guarantees that the resources your armed forces depend on (and the resources those resources depend on, and so on) aren't immediately cut off when you enter a conflict. Every politician this side of Hammurabi has understood this basic fact of sovereignty and in this day and age of military mega-alliances, that kind of control becomes more important than ever.
With the way the electrical generation industry is going, it won't be long before solar panel manufacturing is critical to our national security.
I thought that dumping was selling below the cost of production. But publicly listed big producers like JinkoSolar and Hanwha Q Cells have positive EPS for 2017, albeit not by much:
Further, the tariff applies to all imported cells, not just those originating in mainland China, which is odd if this just to counter unfair advantages that Chinese factories get.
>Further, the tariff applies to all imported cells, not just those originating in mainland China, which is odd if this just to counter unfair advantages that Chinese manufacturers get.
If the tariff were just to target China, China would just route the shipments through other countries to get around the tariffs.
This isn't a hypothetical, incidentally; the US has caught Chinese goods being routed through other countries and mislabelled as to its origin in order to avoid similar tariffs before now.
This was a big part of the honey trade between US/Russia/China from the Netflix documentary "Rotten". I forget if it was tariffs or bans they were evading.
There was some controversy, but much less than with these current broad tariffs.
Such broad tariffs usually leave the industries weak and fat, and after they are finally lifted they will do no better at competing in a global marketplace.
GF2 is definitely building modules from cells. The big question is how long they were planning to import cells from Panasonic's Japanese facilities. Being unable to (affordably) import cells from Chinese factories was one of the problems that killed SolarCity's earlier plan to scale the Silevo technology they acquired, and drove them to Panasonic's cell tech instead.
EDIT: I was initially wondering whether Tesla planned to make cells in the US for GF2 at all, or just import them from Japan, but according to this report from last March they already planned to produce cells in the US:
>The two companies hope to ramp up production at Gigafactory 2 to reach a capacity of 1 to 2 gigawatts of solar products. They currently have “roughly 500 employees” at the plant and the hiring process is ongoing, according to Tesla.
Best part is he's trying to protect solar manufacturing plants, which are largely automated and only employ a few highly-skilled people, while harming installers, which need hundreds of thousands of working-class lower-skill manual laborers to install on roofs.
Congratulations white-working-class Trump base, you played yourself.
Do you know how few jobs a solar panel factory produces? It's on the order of a few thousand.
If you want a LOT more jobs, you need to make sure solar panels are as cheap as possible in order for more to be installed, which is where the labor costs will be.
Who builds those robots? Who installs them. Who creates the factories? Who designs the robotic software. Who sells that software & robotics equipment. Who makes the raw material.
> If China can make cheaper solar panels, LET THEM.
That's a short term win long term loss attitude. China then becomes the R&D center for the next gen energy equipment. That's not in the best long term interest of the US.
US industry is actually very competitive with Chinese industry when it comes to the key ingredient in silicon PV, high purity silicon. Unfortunately, retaliatory tariffs from China that followed the last round of anti-Chinese solar tariffs in the US have prevented US silicon exporters from serving the huge Chinese solar silicon market. Hemlock had to write off over a billion dollars and mothball a nearly-finished US silicon plant, and REC and Wacker's plants in the US are running below capacity. So there is plenty of high quality, low cost refined silicon capacity in the US if wafer and cell plants start operating here. Specialized solar manufacturing equipment is more likely to come from European companies, e.g. Meyer Burger.
It's a matter of proportion. Tariffs are some of the most destructive and distortionary taxes you could implement. The costs will be borne by many, and the benefits, a select few.
How could this affect US solar prices/watt over the next 10 years or so? People seem to be taking a "this could be good in the long run" approach but there seems to be evidence that we don't have a "long run" to tackle climate change [1]. We seem to be playing chicken with a freight train and hoping that the economics will allow us to survive (because capitalism is more important than survival, essentially).
I'm not saying this is a bad move necessarily (I'm not entirely against protecting domestic industry to some extent), I'm just wondering if we were able to muster the collective will to take climate change seriously and do more than just let the market do its thing and hope for the best, how seriously could this affect the total cost? If we were to need to install 500GW of solar power over the next 5-10 years, would this dramatically increase the cost of that effort? Is it remotely possible that domestic production could accommodate a massive public push for solar?
Sorry, it appears I can't edit it now. This is one of many accounts, you could take your pick, but at this point to have hope that things are going to turn out OK you have to ignore expert opinion and listen to conspiracy theorists essentially. For once, the doom-and-gloom predictions are coming from the mainstream and the "we'll be fine" predictions are coming from those on the fringes.
Why just solar, why not place tariff's on all imported goods unfairly priced and dumped into the US market. The US market is bleeding cash.
Our number one export in the future (besides our currency) might be the garbage piles of all the unfairly low priced goods we see as disposable, if it isn't already.
I think, on the whole, it’s a fair policy. Certain countries (China) have been known to engage in dumping[0] of solar panels. So it’s a valid trade policy to protect against dumping.
This is potentially one of the biggest pieces of news of the Trump Administration.† As worldwide deployments of photovoltaic power grow exponentially, electrical energy will become dramatically cheaper starting in the mid-2020s, at least for diurnal uses. Consequently, the prices of goods produced by energy-intensive industries, such as aluminum and solar panels, will begin to drop precipitously, and new energy-intensive industries will become economically feasible, opening up vast new areas of the economy.
And, if these tariffs stand, the US will be at a 30% cost disadvantage in all of these areas, until at least two or three years after the tariffs end, perhaps as long as ten years. This will be a crippling disadvantage for US economic development; entrepreneurs in these industries will wisely avoid investment in the US.
Edit: the actual ruling is https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/Press/fs/201%20Ca... and the tariff is 30% in year 1, 25% in year 2, 20% in year 3, and 15% in year 4. So it doesn't quite reach the mid-2020s when photovoltaic installation really skyrockets, but it seems likely that this tariff will be renewed and extended.
† I say this advisedly. I am well aware the Trump Administration has withdrawn from the Paris Accords; nearly started a second nuclear war, this one with North Korea; implemented a Muslim travel ban; and officially withdrawn from the TPP, although that was almost dead already. I am seriously arguing that handicapping the US economy in this way is at least as significant as these.
The fossil fuel industry basically can hurt the US at this point and they will hurt the US. While everywhere else is starting to head frantically for the exits. China, Europe, India, and bunch of African countries have make commitments toward solar, wind, and transportation electrification.
China's banking system is loaning scads of money to solar manufacturers while in the US the banking system has loaned $1T to fracking, oil and gas companies.
It's also real-politik. CN is trying to corner the market on PV production. Obama supported fracking to punish Putin (RUS is a petro-state). There's more going on than what is read in the NYT. Take your area of expertise and go read about what is written in non-academic settings on the subject. Then realize that this isn't a one-off for your area of expertise. This. is. Everywhere.
Oh sure, kinda brain dead can't adapt to the new post cold war order of things legacy real-politik. Makes sense if your power and status makes sense in terms of cold war conflict.
But the Soviet Union is gone. The neoliberal transformation of Russia is a utter failure. The fossil fuel industry is walking dead at this point do to solar, wind, electrified transportation and the imperative to deal with global warming.
It's a classic people and organizations looking out for their short term interest + risk aversion leads to eventual catastrophe.
And as I mentioned, countries whose leadership have no particular interest in legacy cold war real politik or the Wests fossil fuel hegemony[1] are going to move and move fast.
[1] Other countries leaders absolutely despise being beholden to the oil/gas/fossil fuel industry.
The fracks occurred in at least 630 different wells off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama (see interactive map), and many took place in critical habitat for imperiled loggerhead sea turtles. Oil companies were also allowed to dump about 76 billion gallons of waste fluid into Gulf waters in 2014.
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Not only that, his administration approve fracking with no site-specific analysis of the threats to the environment and also without public involvement.
Taxes imposed on import do not hurt solar, as much as they will help the American solar industry. Tons of American solar companies have nearly been brought to bankruptcy because china is massively subsidizing the export of solar panels.
This problem is also magnified by the fact that Warren Buffet has been using his influence to encourage states to charge panel owners fees relating to grid usage that weren't there prior, as there is a cost associated with continuously switching which direction power from a given houses is flowing.
Reeks of "Trump is for it so it's must be bad" issue that has plagued journalism since he took office.
There's pros and cons to this method of fighting dumping but it's certainly a good thing for American solar panel manufacturers just not the installers (in the short term at least).
Yea, I want to look at his presidency, and actions, in a objective manner.
I've never liked the man, but not everything he is doing is evil.
We have gotten so used to Chinese underhanded business practices; it all starts to look normal. I'm almost to the point where why should I even buy my stuff from Amazon, when I can get it cheaper at Alibaba.
I know Tartifs can be tricky, but we can't just let them take advantage of us.
My hope is he has a group of economists whom are instructing him to slowly test out a few tarrifs, and hopefully, nix any tarrif that's not working. (Yes, I know it's more complicated than deleting a law.)
For a long time I have felt our government almost discourages poor/middleclass entrepreneurs.
We needed a change. Yes--the wealthy will always be able to make money here. They aren't the problem. I don't understand why they are always bitching about paying taxes. It seems like the only time they shut up is during a world war, but it has to be the right war--I guess? A war where they feel guilty about not signing up. I heard we had a 90% tax rate on the wealthy during/after WW2, and the quality of life was never better for most Americas.
My point is I'm shocked at most of Trumps actions, especially the one's will greatly affect the poor.
I'm ok with Tartifs on solar panels, and washing machines right now.
If he makes our pathetic wefare system worse--I don't care what regulation he enacts; I don't want him around.
In my world, that will be the final straw. It was my final straw with Clinton--when he decided to "reform" our terrible welfare system. Actually, he knew the Rebublicsns were about to enact reforms, and decided to take away their thunder. (Thunder--like taking care of the poor, and disenfranchised is wrong?
I'm not on welfare, but have friends who are, and shocked at just how terribly they are treated.
And whenever a Tariff doesn't work, the naysayers run to the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. We really haven't had a lot of Tarrifs in the U.S. in the last twenty-40 years?
My point is I don't want to throw the baby out the cliche. His presidency will be interesting, and hopefully not too painful.
>Taxes imposed on import do not hurt solar, as much as they will help the American solar industry.
What's backing up this claim? Because not only is this at a glance in violation of several trade agreements the U.S. has made internationally, it also defies core theories and principles that have
fueled the last several decades of trade law and agreements [1].
This absolutely REEKS of the typical bullshit the right+ in this country like to put out every time they're elected while also dripping with short sighted protectionism.
China has much better chances of fully automating their solar cell manufacturing, because they are selling worldwide and so have much higher volumes. Presumably the dramatic declines in cost we've seen over the last few years are in large part due to this phenomenon. The US solar-cell manufacturers will remain in the same kind of high-cost, low-quality ghetto that Argentine air-conditioner manufacturers are in.
Trump can definitely cause the inevitable to leave the US playing catch-up in the 2030s, unless he's out of office soon.
Having a fully automated solar cell fab locally would be wonderful. We'd reduce the need for big ships burning sulphur-rich heavy bunker fuel oil. We'd be more resistant to China cutting us off without warning, as they did for rare-earth metals. Even a lights-out factory sometimes needs workers, so that is at least a few jobs.
If you want a coal-related motive, try the obvious: Pennsylvania is an important swing state. Mines are hiring again, for both miners and engineers.
Shipping solar panels overseas is not a significant source of bunker-fuel emissions, and it probably never will be. Complete solar panel modules, without legs, weigh about 10kg per kilowatt: https://www.amazon.com/ECO-WORTHY-10pcs-Watts-Module-System/.... So each TEU of solar panels contains about 2.2 megawatts of generating capacity at 22 tonnes net per TEU. If the world installs 150 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2018, that's about 70000 TEUs.
The Emma Maersk carries 11000 TEUs on every voyage, so the amount of solar panels that will be installed worldwide in 2018 is about 6 shiploads.
What about the future, when photovoltaic becomes the dominant source of marketed energy? According to the IEO, current total world marketed energy consumption is 20 terawatts (20'000 gigawatts), which would amount to about 90 million TEUs, or 8000 shiploads. Call it 30000 shiploads to account for photovoltaic's low capacity factor, typically in the 20%–30% range (though we can expect that to become more efficient as development moves to more equatorial areas with less clouds).
There are currently about 9000 container ships in operation, so current world marketed energy consumption is about three trips for the world's shipping fleet, in the form of photovoltaic panels.
We can presumably expect panels to become smaller and lighter as time goes on, further decreasing the energy needed for shipping, and eventually the proliferation of solar panels will depress the price of energy so low that not even bunker fuel can compete with syngas, at which point the bunker fuel emissions problem will be over.
(Edited to correct order-of-magnitude calculation error.)
I've wondered about the fuel for large cargo ships. From my understanding, freight train engines are basically gas powered generators to produce 480v output to power an electric engine. Not my area of expertise, but this is supposed to be much more fuel efficient than straight combustible engine power.
If that is the case, why would this not work for cargo ships as well?
Converting energy from chemical to electric then mechanical is only beneficial if you need a high torque at low rpm, like to start moving a train. Otherwise its more efficent to directly convert from chemical to mechanical.
Diesel-electric locomotives convert from mechanical energy to electricity and back, which is reasonably efficient, but not 100% efficient. I don't know what efficiencies they get, but at small scales it's easy to hit 88% round-trip efficiency. The advantage is that, like a Prius, you can run the internal-combustion engine always at its optimal efficiency point, whether the train is going full speed or at literally zero speed. Internal combustion engines run extremely poorly at zero speed.
Ship screws, on the other hand, can be designed to run at nearly any speed at all, and nearly all the time the ship is moving at exactly the same speed. So the screws are just coupled directly to the crankshaft of a two-stroke diesel engine the size of a fucking church which remains powered on for years at a time, always running at whatever speed it damn well pleases.
General argument is that we're running out of those due to either natural processes or political processes. We aren't making new dams due to environmental concerns. We aren't even creating dams as a means to sustain California. Instead, we shunt that water to the sea. Add to this a desertification due to global climate change, and you're needing to look elsewhere for power.
Tax cuts will probably steam roll any effects of this tariff for the economy (unless we see a crash relatively soon, but whatever, Dow at 26,214, why stop now?)
I don't think domestic solar panels are 30% more expensive than imports anyway, especially into the future with tax cuts, so the actual increase price paid is probably less.
> new energy-intensive industries will become economically feasible, opening up vast new areas of the economy.
This is a very exciting idea that never occurred to me. We always talk about the challenges facing solar regarding residential use. But a factory could schedule its operations for peak solar or even relocate entirely to places with reliable, consistent solar power. Very interesting.
It's been suggested. The problem is that having to run only during the day, and perhaps only in certain seasons, is a huge impediment to most of the applications you could think of because most energy intensive processes tend to be capital intensive as well.
For instance, I did some cursory analysis on building a chemical plant to do ammonia production in order to take advantage of the negative energy costs that were available in some parts of CA for hours a day thanks to a combination of the duck curve and the overcapacity at Oroville. When you're only running things 2-8 hours a day, you are amortizing the fixed costs over a much smaller output than something running constantly. Even getting paid several cents per kwh to take energy off the grid, it seemed hard to turn a profit.
It doesn't help. You'd account for the storage at opportunity cost (you could sell it back to the grid at night rather than using it). So you'd get the same economics as just pulling power off the grid 24/7. At least for this application, the output was worth less than the marginal cost of the electricity during the more normal periods. If you kept it running like that, you'd be showing a loss even before amortizing the CapEx, so running it constantly would produce worse results.
Having a big installed base of low op-ex power generation will be handy as prices fall, but panels installed now won't be the thing setting those mid 2020s prices.
I'm not posting in support of tariffs, I just don't see the connection between spending now (at today's panel prices and resultant kw-h/dollar) and lower future electricity prices.
I agree, what matters isn't so much the tariffs on the relatively small amount of photovoltaic panels installed in 2018, but the tariffs on the much larger amount installed in 2021–2027.
Solar cost per kWh are still prohibitive for aluminium smelting. Specially because due to the production profile you can sell the energy at much higher price than what you could get by producing aluminium.
Wind OTOH produces a lot of energy at night where demand is low and you can't really shutdown turbines - you must use the energy. Yet I'm not sure if it's feasible to run a plant in those conditions.
I think it is true everywhere in the world that photovoltaic costs per kWh are still prohibitive for aluminum smelting in 2018, but that won't still be true in 2022.
Aluminum pots are usually run off extremely consistent power sources like hydro. I'm not sure how much you have to redesign them to take effective advantage of unpredictable intermittent supplies.
Conventional reservoir-backed hydroelectric dams can be throttled up and down pretty quickly, and can't run at 100% around the clock without depleting the reservoir. The Hoover Dam has an annual capacity factor of only 23%, for example. As solar gets cheap I think that the most cost-effective way to firm it up is to install it connected to the same transmission capacity as an existing hydroelectric project, and throttle the hydro output down when solar generation is strong. There are limits to how much down you can throttle a dam of course. Still it can serve as a hybrid system that marries solar scalability and hydro reliability without paying for battery storage.
Trump didn't create this dispute--it has been ongoing for years, and Obama imposed tariffs on solar imports from China too.
China subsidizes solar and nearly all US manufacturers have been forced to move plants to compete, declare bankruptcy or shutdown.
The question is: after China obtains a stronghold in this market... then what? The Chinese subsides will eventually be removed, and solar panels will return to their natural price--but with all of the supply chain, supplies for materials, r&d, knowhow, etc centralized in and around China.. making it hard for non-Chinese companies to compete.
So look further out--when China no longer subsidizes solar... is that good for the US economy?
Yes, if China had subsidized the US installation of massive new electrical power generation capacity independent of fossil fuels that would last decades, that would have been good for the US economy. It isn't that simple to raise prices on durable productive goods — your customers have to compete against the people who bought the same goods last year at a lower price.
As for the "natural price", the only significant irreducible cost to producing silicon photovoltaic panels is the price of energy itself. Everything else is either literally dirt cheap (silica, alumina, trace quantities of phosphorus) or can be amortized over arbitrarily large production volumes (giant molybdenum crucibles, FIB lithography machines, Ph.D. physicists). In the limit where solar panels are abundant, the "natural price" for solar panels is very nearly the price of the sand they are made from.
That's what Perón said here about US air conditioners. Now it's 70 years later and look how far we've come at not tolerating US business hegemony in air conditioner manufacturing! Nearly all air conditioners sold in Argentina are Argentine. Very nearly no Argentine air conditioners are sold anywhere else in the world, even in neighboring countries. BECAUSE THEY SUCK.
Doesn’t this ultimately raise the price of solar in the US though? Either buy from established Chinese factories at a tarrif adjusted price, or buy from less established US manufacturers at the price they can manage - a higher price than the Chinese factories.
One could imagine instead that the US government competes with China by providing its own solar subsidies. Of course, the republicans would rather the price of solar go up and the government spend money on green energy subsidies...
But it’s clear that making the US competitive in solar isn’t the sole motivation here.
You explain yourself why these tariffs aren't that big of a deal in the long term.
>"electrical energy will become dramatically cheaper starting in the mid-2020s, at least for diurnal uses. Consequently, the prices of goods produced by energy-intensive industries, such as aluminum and solar panels, will begin to drop precipitously, and new energy-intensive industries will become economically feasible, opening up vast new areas of the economy."
Not only will the tariffs halve in four years, photovoltaic prices will substantially drop in parallel. Better to give US manufacturers a chance to reach the promised land of solar you're predicting than allow them to crumble now.
Trade deals like TPP are in theory a good thing and make the world more efficient and put minimums on environmental damage and abuse of workers.
There's some real world stuff that blunts this a bit. Oligarchs can capture more than their fair share of the benefits and not recompense the direct losers (e.g. people having to change jobs and retrain and the areas they live in).
And corporate interests can take advantage of the negotiations to enshrine in what is effectively global law things that benefit them, but are a net negative for the planet e.g overly strong IP protection.
People can still think they are good overall and that the energy should be focused on fixing the bad parts or mitigating the problems.
Trump on the other hand opted out of TPP and then said he wanted to make individual deals with the same countries. This fixes none of the problems I see with TPP, probably makes them worse in fact, so even if you hate trade deals he's not actually achieved anything but a minor delay.
That was not a list of Trump-administration actions that I was opposed to; it was a list of Trump-administration actions that I think are important. I find most of them odious, but that wasn't my point.
One positive is this may help US manufacturers. The Asian countries with strong economies (China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) adopted similar policies in the later half of the 20th century to help develop their manufacturing industries. It worked. The Asian countries that didn't adopt similar policies are still poor today.
This will, of course, raise the cost of solar equipment and washing machines in the U.S. I can understand the GOP wanting to raise the cost of solar power in order to increase the use of fossil fuels, but why washing machines? Did Maytag make a large campaign contribution?
I had been under the impression that Maytag had moved all their production to Mexico and elsewhere, but apparently not. According to this article, they moved some of it back to the US from Mexico (note: Whirlpool owns Maytag).
I've always found anti dumping actions slightly hypocritical. If they just came out and said explicitly it's protectionist and stopped belabouring other economies with the free trade stick, I'd maybe feel better about it.
Roll on peskovite (that's kind of a joke in context)
1 Business lobbies to get oppressive tariffs promising it will spur innovation
2 Tariff passes, business market value rises because of reduced competition
3 Business stops innovating because there is no foreign competition
4 Business shares stagnate without innovative product line because there is little need to innovate
5 Business lobbies for higher tariffs, repeat from step 2
It can be argued that tariffs are little more than Pyrrhic victories for the industries involved that hold back the nation as a whole and create a downward spiral
tariffs on their own are not necessarily productive, they have to be used in conjunction with policies that spur domestic competition.
But most developed nations appear to have gone through a protectionist phase when building their industries, and often beyond, either by imposing tariffs on imports or subsidizing exports, manipulating the currency, providing cheap credit, fat government and military contracts, etc, etc, and that includes America.
And it most certainly applies to China now.
Tariffs and other policies should be designed to balance subsidies, eg the effective postal subsidy for Chinese goods (I use the term loosely, in many cases) delivered to American homes.
Note on this topic: "Solar panels imported from China already have hefty tariffs, but proponents of heavier tariffs say Chinese manufacturers get around those trade remedies by establishing operations in Vietnam and Malaysia and exporting to the U.S. from those countries."
Because phones aren't a strategic asset with geopolitical importance. If China corners the market on solar then they would be able to undermine US energy production in any protracted war (shooting, trade or other), it would be the future equivalent of cutting off the oil/coal supply but with more lag time.
Being unable to get new phones would merely be a personal inconvenience.
China is highly dependent on foreign coal, so they also have a strategic interest in creating energy independence.
It's a political problem not an economic one. From an economic perspective, I am happy that the Chinese government wants to subsidize American solar installations with Chinese capital. As an American worker or American solar technology innovator, I am unhappy that I can't compete.
BOTTOM LINE: you don't win political power/elections by pandering to consumers - you win by pandering to producers.
I did a rough calculation that the value of all solar power generated in 2018 is about the same as the value of we would get out of removing side mirrors from our cars ( about 2% gas saving due to better aerodynamics) and replacing them with cameras/lcd displays. Where are the SV startups doing this? Seems like a huge gain. And we would no longer have to worry about hitting the mirrors when we us a drive up window...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] thread>"The duties are lower than the 35 percent rate the U.S. International Trade Commission recommended in October after finding that imported panels were harming American manufacturers. The idea behind the tariffs is to raise the costs of cheap imports, particularly from Asia, and level the playing field for those who manufacture the parts domestically."
This is largely in support of American manufacturing. Of course it will harm the solar industry through increased prices, but Trump here is balancing an interest in solar with an interest in American industry.
I see it as a win for both sides. Dems get to put on show that they care about the planet. Trump gets to put on a show he’s saving the planet and American manufacturing.
Obama could’ve done the same? Actually he decided to lift a ban on Crude Oil exports. The oil from shale and fracking that flooded the markets in the past years.
Obama's admin was more tempered when it came to oil+gas+petrol+coal.
The admin increased exports, but it also restrained oil exploration in US waters (especially after Deepwater Horizon) and didn't open exploration to most of Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) or just rubberstamp the Keystone XL pipeline (ironically the smaller Keystone pipeline had a fairly large spill the same week as the Trump admin approved the Keystone XL).
That's not to say that the Obama Admin was nearly as "anti-oil" as it was portrayed in conservative-biased news. They were remarkably accommodating when the cost-benefit analysis was positive for the country.
There's a lot of things to be said about Trump and economic protectionism, but saying it's entirely fueled by donor pressure is oversimplifying the situation.
Source, please? Given the absurd amount of corruption going on in the administration (i.e. the missing inaugural funds and Mar-a-lago vacations, to name just a tiny fraction) and Trump's own charities, I find the idea that he spent even a penny of his own money on his campaign laughable based on first principles. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary, other than his own patently unreliable rhetoric.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/nov/...
"Trump received about $239 million from donors who gave less than $200 in total. That amounts to 69 percent of the Trump campaign’s individual contributions;
Hillary Clinton received about $137 million from $200-or-under donors. That made up 22 percent of the campaign’s individual contributions;"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016...
"President-elect Donald Trump didn't need $100 million of his money to win the White House in the end.
Trump contributed another $10 million to his presidential campaign in the closing days of the election, bringing his total investment in the race to $66.1 million, new filings confirm."
[1] https://www.fec.gov/files/bulk-downloads/index.html?prefix=b... (I wasn't able to load indiv16.zip and analyze it but the total loan amount from the other data is a only few million shy of the $66 million total).
Everyone is subsidizing fossil fuel production. Most countries agreed a few years ago that they were doing so and promised to stop, but little progress has been made on that.
The IMF has some numbers here:
https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonew0...
About 7% of global GDP in subsidies.
China is the highest by dollar amount, Ukraine highest per capita.
If solar eventually becomes an important source of power, the US would not want to be wholly reliant on a geopolitical rival for manufacturing expertise. This could thus be construed as a vote for the long-term dominance of solar as an energy source.
Unless it's also backed up with added incentives to manufacture solar in country. I predict that won't happen, and even if it did new plants of any significance would be 5-10 years out and in the meantime all we've done is shot ourselves in the foot.
Raising taxes isn't a big priority for him atm. Those pro-solar deductions are used by a great may companies.
No true Scotsman. One doesn't exclude the other. Perhaps this is even next on his list, who knows (lets not give him ideas wink)
I suspect the only real hold back of the administration is that it is understaffed to fully attack all of the solar programs effectively.
It's already clear that solar is only getting cheaper and more viable globally, this is a long term vote for maintaining our national security by guaranteeing that an entire industry can compete with foreign companies that are subsidized by their governments.
Just because it happened for a long time doesn't mean it is necessarily right, moral, or just.
This fallacious argument was used to retain slavery in the US for 50+ years after it was abolished in Britain/UK. It was used to justify restricting voting to white, landholding men and banning interracial marriage for centuries.
And if I were to use one of the president's favorite fallacies against himself[2], "what about" all of the places in the world where we reject local sovereignty for the supposed "national security" of the USA? I would argue that all of the problems the US has had with Iran since the late 1960s have to do with the USA's lack of respect for Iranian sovereignty in the 1950s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
It's not an appeal to tradition to tell someone to predict the motion of a slow moving football with Newtonian mechanics.
The correct response when someone who is sort of a competitor is selling you stuff below cost is probably to buy lots and lots of it.
I don't think Trump would have went for that solution tho, since he wants to kill EnergyStar: http://e360.yale.edu/features/killing-energy-star-a-popular-...
Except that quite a few of the cheaper Chinese-made solar panels have shorter lifetimes than the American-made ones did.
Consequently, installers have started getting burned because they are getting warranty claims much sooner than they should be. And, of course, the supplier of the Chinese panels is long gone. And most of the American suppliers have been driven out of business by the cheaper prices--which means the installers can't switch to more reliable panels.
Now, do I think Trump thought about any of this? Not even slightly.
However, because solar panels are durable goods (or perhaps you prefer "capital expense") the calculus is a bit more complicated than just "cheaper is gooder".
All of them specifically cited the Chinese flood with causing them to cash out.
They weren't prescient enough to predict the drop in actual reliability, but they could see very quickly that they were going to be the ones holding the bag on warranty claims with Chinese suppliers. And, if they didn't use Chinese suppliers, they couldn't compete on price. So, they just got out.
Solar Fabrication plants are being made in the USA, and from my understanding, we have higher-tech panels which reach higher levels of efficiency. If the solar manufacturing industry gets a boost in the US, then we can likely make them cheaper too, due to the scaling of mass production.
This is a nice read: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2017/0...
Quote: "The nation is on track to overdeliver on the emissions reduction commitments it put forward under the Paris climate agreement"
And: "Compared with the Chinese coal fleet, even the best U.S. plants are running older, less efficient technologies."
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16271
Cleaner coal plants in China are still dirtier than natural gas plants in the US.
China greenhouse gas emissions per capita are less than half the USA's.[1]
1. https://wri.org/blog/2014/11/6-graphs-explain-world%E2%80%99...
China has 320 GW of installed hydro power, compared to 80 in the US.
China had 160 GW of installed wind power in 2016, compared to 80 in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
It could still make sense but I haven't seen a lot of the full rationale.
Also note that unless this is done within the WTO framework, it is likely to start/escalate (depending on your interpretation of previous events) a "trade war" (arms race of tariffs) which ultimately hurts the US consumer.
China will be selling to less of the rest of the world once the rest of the world stops allowing economic dumping from China.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...
Of course the point is to put everyone else out of business or crippled so China can reap all the profits. It's a fairly common monopolistic tactic.
Solar panel manufacturers cried foul while China simply out-managed the US players on the supply chain, so the US slapped tariffs on Chinese finished panels. China says, ok, so that's how you want it, and then they slap tariffs on cheap US-manufactured polysilicon. Most Americans (and sadly, most American politicians) don't know that up until recently those cheap Chinese solar panels started life as gravel, coal, and wood chips in America's rust belt. And jobs. Well, not anymore. South Korea, not near as foolish as the Obama administration, and not subject to the same high retaliatory tariffs, is now taking over the lead position in polysilicon. They didn't even say thanks.
Let's tour a polysilicon plant near Moses Lake, WA. Whoops. Closed down a few years ago when they couldn't compete with other countries for China's voracious polysilicon appetite. Hemlock Semiconductor, once the largest polysilicon manufacturer in the world, is hemorrhaging jobs left and right in Michigan. Both Hemlock and Wacker announced huge new polysilicon plants in Tennessee, investing billions, then mothballing them before they hit production because Uncle Sam suckerpunched the US polysilicon industry by playing anticompetitive with the US solar panel industry.
This made sense to an extent when the Democrats were in charge, because US solar panel factories were in blue voting areas and US polysilicon factories and suppliers were in red voting areas. Now it's simple pandering and incompetence.
Be careful with labeling it "American manufacturing". We've lost our worldwide leadership position and while we may buy American more at home, the rest of the world is moving on without our dominance.
And US based cell manufacturing may indeed grow; Tesla is one driver, and JinkoSolar might be the next in line:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/01/22/jinkosolar-looks-to-s...
I have a little hope that this might also finally get Hanwha Q Cells and 1366 Technologies to launch a full-scale manufacturing partnership. I really like what 1366 has invented but if they wait years more to go industrial-scale they'll get their cost advantages erased by continued incremental improvements in traditional wafering.
These tariffs are not going to make American solar manufacturing dominate the global solar market. It might end up like with foreign automobile trade wars in the 1980s -- factories owned by overseas companies, but actual manufacturing operations in the US.
I'd prefer if we didn't go through several years of artificially elevated prices from these tariffs in the first place, but I think there's a decent chance it will actually lead to new American factories for cells and modules. Those plants will need to be bigger scale than past American facilities if they don't want to die as soon as the tariffs expire. Suniva's biggest problem IMO is that they were trying to manufacture in America at ~5% the scale of globally competitive manufacturers. They were unprofitable so they didn't scale up, and they didn't scale up because they were unprofitable.
I don't follow. Don't both scenarios wreak of pandering and incompetence?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The carrot approach would have bene to prop up companies like Solyndra. We know how that was received.
As simple example: the British supported the German chemicals industry prior to WWI.
At the start of WWI, the money the British spent had been turned into German chemical expertise. This lead to the development of the Haber process, poison gas, and generally making Germany a powerhouse in chemicals in the same way Britain was in mechanical manufacturing.
If a tariff had been put in place on German imports to Britain the German chemical industry would have been much smaller, with much less capability and WWI would have finished in 6 months because Germany would have run out of nitric acid for their explosives.
Another way to stop wars is to accept that somebody else is more economically productive and let the whole world benefit from that instead of trying to destroy it.
Economics is only allowed a free reign so long as it meets the goals of those currently in power in a given political unit.
Try selling nuclear technology to Iran if you don't think that it applies to the US as much as to China.
Doing it strategically to prevent a nuclear war 30 years down the line is the lesser of two evils.
* Manufacturing them at home is better for local workers and provides a straightforward path for dispaced workers from other plant work.
* Trying to compete on even terms with what is essentially slave labor overseas drags us all down.
* There is value in economic independence, especially when you're importing from a fairweather ally. You don't want to wipe out a local industry that you might need to lean on someday.
The reasons for having tarriffs are apparently obvious to everyone except economists.
* Innovate on automation.
* Then subsidize our industry, rather than tax imports. Taxing imports simply hurts the industry as a whole. Minnesota solar is a good case study [1]
1 http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/02/15/solar-job-growth-exp...
Because European know-how and industry, and thus competitive advantage, gets lost. I don't want a dictatorship like China having the massive amount of leverage it already has. China has brought European solar, steel and electronics production to its knees by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.
Especially the stranglehold China has over the West when it comes to electronics will bite the West more sooner than later.
By the way, China is doing a similar thing to Africa: with all the money the West gave to them for cheap electronics they're building (and thus taking operational control) rail and road infrastructure.
From Chinese perspective it's the perfect ultra long game... the rest of the world is in for a massive shock once they run afoul of Chinese goals wherever and whenever that might be.
No, and that's why I said "long game". For now, of course, African countries selling themselves out to China will profit - but the countries are, basically, binding their future on the goodwill of China. Just imagine the countries decide one day that they're done with cheap low quality China crap, that they want to incentivize local production or that they want to show solidarity with Tibet or Taiwan... say goodbye to your traffic infrastructure, that will be the Chinese response.
The West made Africa totally dependent on mitumba (cheap second-hand clothing that all but destroyed local textile industry) and other foreign aid (after all, Africa is a nice dumping ground for overproduced European milk and other food - do "something good" and keep European prices high at the same time), and the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.
I'm not sure how you're proposing that would happen. Like ripping up roads? Or like, not renewing a contract for future repairs? And would that be different from the abandoned projects from NGO's?
> the Chinese are doing the same with their money. Colonialism at its finest.
I think there's some projection here... Although I grew up in the U.S., I've visited relatives frequently enough to come at this with a different perspective.
In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.
In American culture, I've heard it said that no two countries that both have a McDonalds would go to war with one another. So I don't think this is really so different.
> cheap low quality China crap
um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias. A lot of high quality products come out of China these days, and the last time I visited (in 2017), Shanghai seemed way more high tech than the SF Bay Area. One area in which there is a lack of talent is in brand marketing, and I'll explain what the problem is with two scenarios:
1) U.S. brand wants to get a particular product made. Gets quotes from X suppliers. Chooses the lowest cost estimate, which happens to cut corners, reinforcing the low image of Chinese exports.
2) Chinese manufacturers release their own products into a Chinese market. Manufacturers compete against each other for consumer preference, and high quality products are rewarded. That's where the good stuff is. Problem is, these companies don't tend to have a lot of in-house marketing talent for making the right kind of ads for the West, despite having lots of technical / manufacturing / design expertise.
One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching. In case of conflict, forbid the personnel from working, order the personnel back home - or, in severe cases, to activate a hidden killswitch on the IT equipment (which can be done even from remote). A railroad network without a working dispatch is useless, dito for airports. In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers the unspoken threat alone is enough to coerce any country into doing what China wants.
> In Chinese culture (and perhaps some other cultures as well), there is a notion that nations that have economic ties with one another are highly disincentivized from going to war with each other. And also, that nations with hard infrastructure, such as roads, a stable power grid, and soft infrastructure, including high literacy rates, low rates of religion, and dual-income households being the norm, have the ability to grow their GDP more effectively, and less likely to give into religious fundamentalism, civil wars, and general unrest.
Indeed, indeed - and exactly this is what makes me afraid. Who is going to oppose China when they try to annex Taiwan for good? I'd be surprised if the US actually follows through on their decades of pledges to Taiwan. Or when they will turn into that massive monster of a surveillance state enabled by modern technology? When everyone has ties to China, China has leverage. (Just as the US has, yes, but at least the US are a democracy and bound to human rights at their core.)
> um... I'm not sure whether to call this conscious bias or unconscious bias.
Combination of both, I'd say - the "conscious bias" backed by countless stories of faked high-quality Western products ending up even in legitimate supply chains and sometimes endangering lives.
One privilege of starting a company in the U.S. is that people don't automatically assume your business practices are similar to Uber's, or Exxon, or pharma bro. And conversations about your products aren't derailed by 10-things-I-hate-about-(country) (e.g., was there another drone strike on a wedding?).
The problem is that whenever a Chinese company does good things, is completely reasonable, makes great progress, which is 99.99% of the time, it is either: 1) not covered because it's not news, or 2) somehow spun into OMG-China-is-ahead fear-mongering.
Why does this happen? China-bashing gets you eyeballs. As an acquaintance of mine has mentioned to me, she gets requests from Western journalists of OMG-Asian-guys-are-sexist article quotes all the time. When she wants to tell them the truth, they no longer want to get her quote. There's an army of those writers and they're all full time. It's their job to tell you how nice it is here and terrible over there even when they're not giving you an accurate impression.
China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.
Nefarious plans to control the world? China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers. It is the crucial tendency towards commerce over war that has caused the past couple centuries of turmoil.
Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution? How does China measure up to that?
> One way, for example: Have only Chinese nationals operate the railway equipment or the dispatching... In today's world where nothing operates without massive amounts of computers...
I've only met a few Chinese entrepreneurs who work in Africa, so my insight here will be limited in scope, but that's better than entirely theoretical.
These are just ordinary people -- I mean, they're adventurous enough to venture out and build a company, find product-market-fit, whether that's selling cell phones in South Africa or lingerie in Egypt. The notion that they are secretly at the beck-and-call of a shadowy government organization as opposed to entrepreneurs eking out a profit doesn't ring true. As much as that's not a researched scientific opinion, I can say that your assessment bears no resemblance to the folks I've gotten to know.
They have more in common with the Chinese diaspora, the engineers, the doctors and lawyers, the parental generation of restauranteurs and laundry shop owners, than some shadowy conspiracy to hold some country's infrastructure hostage for military reasons.
The Africa that they describe to me is so different from the one I see in movies like Black Hawk Down. They talk about every shortcoming as a potential business opportunity, not as a derogatory way to judge the country or continent. They talk about the impact of gender roles being an inhibitory force on GDP growth, and how frustrating / unexpected it is for women to quit a manufacturing job when they get married....
Well anything with "disruption" in the name certainly will be assumed to follow business practices similar to Uber - they (and AirBnB) poisoned the well pretty much with their blatant disregard for any kind of law. For the other part, I fully agree with you - and hell there should be way more discussions on drone strikes.
> China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.
I agree that China has done massive leaps in economic terms - but not so on the human-rights part... and that's where much of the progress that has been made actually comes from: debts in terms of ecology disasters and debts in human rights (as shown e.g. by the suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country).
> China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers.
Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power. China has learned there from the Soviet Union which was dragged into bankruptcy by trying to keep up with the US in military terms... today all you need is economic power. China (and to a certain extent the Arabian countries) have total leverage over the West, given the dependence of Western civilizations on cheap oil and China as a production house.
> Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution?
None for #1, and "warmongering" is a bit of an understatement for #2.
> How does China measure up to that?
On this part: very well indeed. What angers me is that the Chinese leadership does not have a tiny dent of respect for human rights (e.g. Tibet, but especially their desire to be a state in total control over their citizenry). Today's China simply has different focus on where they want to ignore any progress in human rights.
They may have made missteps along the way, but if Flint, Michigan or Puerto Rico were in China, they'd both be fixed by now... Though hypotheticals are unhelpful, I know.
> suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country
Bashing Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) is often done in the same vein as China-bashing. Even before the suicide nets, the suicide rates were lower than the population at large. It's just that when you have a large enough population working at the same company, any number seems like a lot. Even without accounting for the suicide clustering effect, the rate was lower than similar-age populations at universities. After the nets went up, the suicide rate became almost negligible, similar to the prevention methods installed at the Golden Gate bridge.
> Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power.
Until someone fear-mongers you into a plausible enemy. And then you're screwed. Prepare for another century of bloodletting? (Shudders.)
> How does China measure up to that? > ignore any progress in human rights
A lot of the progress simply doesn't get reported in the West because it's not China-bashing enough to get eyeballs. There is this popular perception that freedom of assembly doesn't exist or that all protests get cracked down on. In recent memory, there was a strike of factory workers in Beijing and Shanghai, and it resulted in better working conditions and a higher minimum wage. There's lots of progress, but we just don't hear about it here. You should have seen the state of human rights during my grandparents' time when the KMT (the political party that self-exiled to Taiwan and was the official China internationally for a generation) was in charge.
I'm glad we live in modern times and not those times.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
It appears to be popular with racists (at least going by the YouTube comments) because the middle-class Chinese engineers are needing to cope with very poor tribal workers who are not quite on board with the concept of the 9-5 culture but I felt the film itself humanised all sides and I was particularly touched by one scene where the engineers try to decide what to do about a worker who has damaged some bit of equipment that he wouldn't be able to afford to repair.
Generally made me feel good about the future of humanity.
1. This assumes that the way we build solar panels (or whatever) never changes. We lost a lot of steel-making knowledge in the early 20th century. Of course, all that "expertise" was replaced by machines, so it was mostly a loss of obsolete knowledge.
2. The solution is to pocket a fraction of the savings and keep that in your back pocket to maintain a teaching/research corps and to ramp up internal expertise when/if the subsidies stop flowing. Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.
Yeah but the Chinese basically took the European process, scaled it up and dumped the prices by using extremely low cost labor and massive state subsidies both at construction of the plants and at selling the product. There's no invention there, only the aim of totally destroying the competition. The only inventions happening are in research labs - and as there are no more notable fabs left in Europe or the US, that research will be applied in China. Our taxes basically funding our continued downfall...
> Of course, this assumes a level of competence, self-control, and foresight that may be missing in modern legislatures.
The only country which ever had this is Norway with its ultra massive oil fund. The Arabian countries are playing catch-up there with their recent investments but... well... building a fully air conditioned soccer stadium right in the midst of a hot desert isn't exactly a wise (or environment friendly) investment, much less a dozen of them. In addition, engaging in more-or-less pointless turf and proxy wars all over Arabia (and parts of Northern Africa too) are a totally unneeded drain on their resources.
A common bias amongst Westerners who have never visited China. Actually, a lot of "home-grown" innovation happens in China, but is not really covered by Western media. You don't get double digit GDP growth without research into R&D across a broad range of sectors.
The solar panels that were produced a decade ago are also not as efficient as the ones produced today, and are productized in very different ways. For instance, light-weight solar panel kits that include a battery pack and LED lighting have a very high product-market-fit for ethnic Mongolian nomads (who follow their herds) and sell like hotcakes over there. You can get another add-on kit for charging your smartphone.
I meant this sentence in direct reference to what happened with solar panel productions (because scaling and dumping in an extremely short timeframe was what happened and broke the neck of European solar).
I know that China has a massive ecosystem of invention (evidenced e.g. by the "gongkai" reports by Andrew Huang), I didn't want to laugh that down - sorry if it came across that way.
For centuries this has just been called plain capitalism. Now that China is doing the same, Europeans and Americans are in a shock? How interesting.
Is your assumption here that no non-europeans (including the Chinese) have contributed to solar research?
>by a combination of slavery-backed price dumping, industrial espionage, knowledge-transfer extortions (aka "to do business in China you have to find a local partner and work with them") and outright buying of the shells of doomed European companies.
You will need to provide massive objective evidence (i.e. not 2-3 links from googling "china solar" ) before anyone believes that giant assertion. Personally, I neither want a $5000 made in USA iPhone or a $99 bottom of the barrel chiPhone, but YMMV.
* "slavery-backed price dumping": There have been more than enough reports on the gruesome working conditions in Chinese factories. They are so widespread and notorious, they got dedicated their own Simpsons "couch gag" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEki-IBdop8). And yes, I consider this dumping - because a company that operates to Western working conditions has no way of competition against people with 80-hour workweeks, armies of children and adhering to safety protocols.
* For industrial espionage, the same (e.g. Nortel, Dupont, Transrapid, Volkswagen/First Automotive Works, plus countless cases in the German Mittelstand - even the German Constitution Protection Bureau warns about this: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verfassungsschutz-china-spi...). According to a (bit dated, though) report, up to half of Mittelstand companies have reported Chinese cyber-espionage: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/industriespionage-was-...
* For buying shells of doomed European companies, have a look at e.g. https://www.morgenpost.de/wirtschaft/article207409333/Chines... - companies from as humble as trash burner EEW to such household names as Krauss-Maffei and Syngenta.
With the way the electrical generation industry is going, it won't be long before solar panel manufacturing is critical to our national security.
http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/report/jks
http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/report/hqcl
Further, the tariff applies to all imported cells, not just those originating in mainland China, which is odd if this just to counter unfair advantages that Chinese factories get.
If the tariff were just to target China, China would just route the shipments through other countries to get around the tariffs.
The upside to this news is that the tariff expires after 4 years according to http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/370171-trump-im... while the Bloomberg article implies it will stick at 15 percent until someone cancels it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/business/global/us-sets-ta...
There was some controversy, but much less than with these current broad tariffs.
Such broad tariffs usually leave the industries weak and fat, and after they are finally lifted they will do no better at competing in a global marketplace.
https://electrek.co/2018/01/09/tesla-solar-roof-tile-install...
This isn't necessarily great for the solar industry, but this is great for Tesla!
EDIT: I was initially wondering whether Tesla planned to make cells in the US for GF2 at all, or just import them from Japan, but according to this report from last March they already planned to produce cells in the US:
https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/silevo-technology-ditch...
>The two companies hope to ramp up production at Gigafactory 2 to reach a capacity of 1 to 2 gigawatts of solar products. They currently have “roughly 500 employees” at the plant and the hiring process is ongoing, according to Tesla.
Congratulations white-working-class Trump base, you played yourself.
Do you know how few jobs a solar panel factory produces? It's on the order of a few thousand.
If you want a LOT more jobs, you need to make sure solar panels are as cheap as possible in order for more to be installed, which is where the labor costs will be.
If China can make cheaper solar panels, LET THEM.
> If China can make cheaper solar panels, LET THEM.
That's a short term win long term loss attitude. China then becomes the R&D center for the next gen energy equipment. That's not in the best long term interest of the US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm not saying this is a bad move necessarily (I'm not entirely against protecting domestic industry to some extent), I'm just wondering if we were able to muster the collective will to take climate change seriously and do more than just let the market do its thing and hope for the best, how seriously could this affect the total cost? If we were to need to install 500GW of solar power over the next 5-10 years, would this dramatically increase the cost of that effort? Is it remotely possible that domestic production could accommodate a massive public push for solar?
If that's true, then 30% more expensive panels would increase the cost of a solar farm by 12%, falling to 30%/6% in 4 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/05/carbon-e...
Our number one export in the future (besides our currency) might be the garbage piles of all the unfairly low priced goods we see as disposable, if it isn't already.
This article is old, but I think it is still the same: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03...
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
And, if these tariffs stand, the US will be at a 30% cost disadvantage in all of these areas, until at least two or three years after the tariffs end, perhaps as long as ten years. This will be a crippling disadvantage for US economic development; entrepreneurs in these industries will wisely avoid investment in the US.
Edit: the actual ruling is https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/files/Press/fs/201%20Ca... and the tariff is 30% in year 1, 25% in year 2, 20% in year 3, and 15% in year 4. So it doesn't quite reach the mid-2020s when photovoltaic installation really skyrockets, but it seems likely that this tariff will be renewed and extended.
Edit: I added a comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16209749 with calculations about the physical size of the panels needed for the energy-source transition.
† I say this advisedly. I am well aware the Trump Administration has withdrawn from the Paris Accords; nearly started a second nuclear war, this one with North Korea; implemented a Muslim travel ban; and officially withdrawn from the TPP, although that was almost dead already. I am seriously arguing that handicapping the US economy in this way is at least as significant as these.
Trump is just trying to hurt solar, because he is paid by the dying coal industry. But he can't stop the inevitable, maybe slow it down slightly.
China's banking system is loaning scads of money to solar manufacturers while in the US the banking system has loaned $1T to fracking, oil and gas companies.
But the Soviet Union is gone. The neoliberal transformation of Russia is a utter failure. The fossil fuel industry is walking dead at this point do to solar, wind, electrified transportation and the imperative to deal with global warming.
It's a classic people and organizations looking out for their short term interest + risk aversion leads to eventual catastrophe.
And as I mentioned, countries whose leadership have no particular interest in legacy cold war real politik or the Wests fossil fuel hegemony[1] are going to move and move fast.
[1] Other countries leaders absolutely despise being beholden to the oil/gas/fossil fuel industry.
That is untrue, President Obama hated fracking and did much to discourage it.
Maybe he said he hated it. I am not sure about the "did much to discourage" part.
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2016/...
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The fracks occurred in at least 630 different wells off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama (see interactive map), and many took place in critical habitat for imperiled loggerhead sea turtles. Oil companies were also allowed to dump about 76 billion gallons of waste fluid into Gulf waters in 2014.
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Not only that, his administration approve fracking with no site-specific analysis of the threats to the environment and also without public involvement.
He tried and got struck down. He did what he could without Congress to help.
This problem is also magnified by the fact that Warren Buffet has been using his influence to encourage states to charge panel owners fees relating to grid usage that weren't there prior, as there is a cost associated with continuously switching which direction power from a given houses is flowing.
Reeks of "Trump is for it so it's must be bad" issue that has plagued journalism since he took office.
There's pros and cons to this method of fighting dumping but it's certainly a good thing for American solar panel manufacturers just not the installers (in the short term at least).
I've never liked the man, but not everything he is doing is evil.
We have gotten so used to Chinese underhanded business practices; it all starts to look normal. I'm almost to the point where why should I even buy my stuff from Amazon, when I can get it cheaper at Alibaba.
I know Tartifs can be tricky, but we can't just let them take advantage of us.
My hope is he has a group of economists whom are instructing him to slowly test out a few tarrifs, and hopefully, nix any tarrif that's not working. (Yes, I know it's more complicated than deleting a law.)
For a long time I have felt our government almost discourages poor/middleclass entrepreneurs.
We needed a change. Yes--the wealthy will always be able to make money here. They aren't the problem. I don't understand why they are always bitching about paying taxes. It seems like the only time they shut up is during a world war, but it has to be the right war--I guess? A war where they feel guilty about not signing up. I heard we had a 90% tax rate on the wealthy during/after WW2, and the quality of life was never better for most Americas.
My point is I'm shocked at most of Trumps actions, especially the one's will greatly affect the poor.
I'm ok with Tartifs on solar panels, and washing machines right now.
If he makes our pathetic wefare system worse--I don't care what regulation he enacts; I don't want him around.
In my world, that will be the final straw. It was my final straw with Clinton--when he decided to "reform" our terrible welfare system. Actually, he knew the Rebublicsns were about to enact reforms, and decided to take away their thunder. (Thunder--like taking care of the poor, and disenfranchised is wrong?
I'm not on welfare, but have friends who are, and shocked at just how terribly they are treated.
And whenever a Tariff doesn't work, the naysayers run to the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act. We really haven't had a lot of Tarrifs in the U.S. in the last twenty-40 years?
My point is I don't want to throw the baby out the cliche. His presidency will be interesting, and hopefully not too painful.
(Sorry--I'm not feeling great today.)
What's backing up this claim? Because not only is this at a glance in violation of several trade agreements the U.S. has made internationally, it also defies core theories and principles that have fueled the last several decades of trade law and agreements [1].
This absolutely REEKS of the typical bullshit the right+ in this country like to put out every time they're elected while also dripping with short sighted protectionism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_histo...
Trump can definitely cause the inevitable to leave the US playing catch-up in the 2030s, unless he's out of office soon.
If you want a coal-related motive, try the obvious: Pennsylvania is an important swing state. Mines are hiring again, for both miners and engineers.
The Emma Maersk carries 11000 TEUs on every voyage, so the amount of solar panels that will be installed worldwide in 2018 is about 6 shiploads.
What about the future, when photovoltaic becomes the dominant source of marketed energy? According to the IEO, current total world marketed energy consumption is 20 terawatts (20'000 gigawatts), which would amount to about 90 million TEUs, or 8000 shiploads. Call it 30000 shiploads to account for photovoltaic's low capacity factor, typically in the 20%–30% range (though we can expect that to become more efficient as development moves to more equatorial areas with less clouds).
There are currently about 9000 container ships in operation, so current world marketed energy consumption is about three trips for the world's shipping fleet, in the form of photovoltaic panels.
Total container shipping volume is already about 470 million TEUs per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_ship#Container_ports
We can presumably expect panels to become smaller and lighter as time goes on, further decreasing the energy needed for shipping, and eventually the proliferation of solar panels will depress the price of energy so low that not even bunker fuel can compete with syngas, at which point the bunker fuel emissions problem will be over.
(Edited to correct order-of-magnitude calculation error.)
If that is the case, why would this not work for cargo ships as well?
Ship screws, on the other hand, can be designed to run at nearly any speed at all, and nearly all the time the ship is moving at exactly the same speed. So the screws are just coupled directly to the crankshaft of a two-stroke diesel engine the size of a fucking church which remains powered on for years at a time, always running at whatever speed it damn well pleases.
I don't think domestic solar panels are 30% more expensive than imports anyway, especially into the future with tax cuts, so the actual increase price paid is probably less.
This is a very exciting idea that never occurred to me. We always talk about the challenges facing solar regarding residential use. But a factory could schedule its operations for peak solar or even relocate entirely to places with reliable, consistent solar power. Very interesting.
For instance, I did some cursory analysis on building a chemical plant to do ammonia production in order to take advantage of the negative energy costs that were available in some parts of CA for hours a day thanks to a combination of the duck curve and the overcapacity at Oroville. When you're only running things 2-8 hours a day, you are amortizing the fixed costs over a much smaller output than something running constantly. Even getting paid several cents per kwh to take energy off the grid, it seemed hard to turn a profit.
I'm not posting in support of tariffs, I just don't see the connection between spending now (at today's panel prices and resultant kw-h/dollar) and lower future electricity prices.
Wind OTOH produces a lot of energy at night where demand is low and you can't really shutdown turbines - you must use the energy. Yet I'm not sure if it's feasible to run a plant in those conditions.
Aluminum pots are usually run off extremely consistent power sources like hydro. I'm not sure how much you have to redesign them to take effective advantage of unpredictable intermittent supplies.
Most large wind turbines have pitch control (Some newer turbines even have individual blade pitch control to counter asymmetric loads)
China subsidizes solar and nearly all US manufacturers have been forced to move plants to compete, declare bankruptcy or shutdown.
The question is: after China obtains a stronghold in this market... then what? The Chinese subsides will eventually be removed, and solar panels will return to their natural price--but with all of the supply chain, supplies for materials, r&d, knowhow, etc centralized in and around China.. making it hard for non-Chinese companies to compete.
So look further out--when China no longer subsidizes solar... is that good for the US economy?
As for the "natural price", the only significant irreducible cost to producing silicon photovoltaic panels is the price of energy itself. Everything else is either literally dirt cheap (silica, alumina, trace quantities of phosphorus) or can be amortized over arbitrarily large production volumes (giant molybdenum crucibles, FIB lithography machines, Ph.D. physicists). In the limit where solar panels are abundant, the "natural price" for solar panels is very nearly the price of the sand they are made from.
One could imagine instead that the US government competes with China by providing its own solar subsidies. Of course, the republicans would rather the price of solar go up and the government spend money on green energy subsidies...
But it’s clear that making the US competitive in solar isn’t the sole motivation here.
Incidentally, the "US manufacturers" supporting this tariff are owned by Chinese and German parent companies.
>"electrical energy will become dramatically cheaper starting in the mid-2020s, at least for diurnal uses. Consequently, the prices of goods produced by energy-intensive industries, such as aluminum and solar panels, will begin to drop precipitously, and new energy-intensive industries will become economically feasible, opening up vast new areas of the economy."
Not only will the tariffs halve in four years, photovoltaic prices will substantially drop in parallel. Better to give US manufacturers a chance to reach the promised land of solar you're predicting than allow them to crumble now.
There's some real world stuff that blunts this a bit. Oligarchs can capture more than their fair share of the benefits and not recompense the direct losers (e.g. people having to change jobs and retrain and the areas they live in).
And corporate interests can take advantage of the negotiations to enshrine in what is effectively global law things that benefit them, but are a net negative for the planet e.g overly strong IP protection.
People can still think they are good overall and that the energy should be focused on fixing the bad parts or mitigating the problems.
Trump on the other hand opted out of TPP and then said he wanted to make individual deals with the same countries. This fixes none of the problems I see with TPP, probably makes them worse in fact, so even if you hate trade deals he's not actually achieved anything but a minor delay.
It's a tiny number of manufacturing jobs, at the expense of far more solar installation jobs, and the largely US-owned companies that do installs.
http://www.toledoblade.com/business/2017/03/19/Huge-Whirlpoo...
Roll on peskovite (that's kind of a joke in context)
1 Business lobbies to get oppressive tariffs promising it will spur innovation
2 Tariff passes, business market value rises because of reduced competition
3 Business stops innovating because there is no foreign competition
4 Business shares stagnate without innovative product line because there is little need to innovate
5 Business lobbies for higher tariffs, repeat from step 2
It can be argued that tariffs are little more than Pyrrhic victories for the industries involved that hold back the nation as a whole and create a downward spiral
But most developed nations appear to have gone through a protectionist phase when building their industries, and often beyond, either by imposing tariffs on imports or subsidizing exports, manipulating the currency, providing cheap credit, fat government and military contracts, etc, etc, and that includes America.
And it most certainly applies to China now.
Tariffs and other policies should be designed to balance subsidies, eg the effective postal subsidy for Chinese goods (I use the term loosely, in many cases) delivered to American homes.
http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/369838-week-ahe...
Being unable to get new phones would merely be a personal inconvenience.
China is highly dependent on foreign coal, so they also have a strategic interest in creating energy independence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open%E2%80%93closed_political_...
BOTTOM LINE: you don't win political power/elections by pandering to consumers - you win by pandering to producers.