> But the German manufacturer Solarworld lost the price war against Chinese competitors and went bankrupt in 2018, leaving the factory building in Freiberg empty until Meyer Burger's new production moved in.
Of course you can be competitive when your startup cost has a significant devaluation step.
Sure, it's zero if you ignore all the development and maintenance costs.
Plus, robots aren't necessarily better at making things. Tesla, for example, rolled back its fully automated production line because it wasn't as adaptable as humans are.
That’s really not so true any more. The number of industrial robots is higher in places like Hong Kong than the US (and China as a whole is not far behind in spite of their massive population) while places like Singapore and South Korea has massive robotics per capita. China has decent wages in many places, higher than much of the world, and they have pretty strong agglomeration effects now, improving manufacturing efficiency.
Not to take away from the Asian countries, but this is a story about Germans putting together their own panels. It’s cool to see some variety springing up. One can support their own manufacturing tech and save on transportation.
As I understand it, it's not just low wages but also the supply chain ecosystem. Anything you could possibly need for high-tech product manufacturing is available locally in Shenzen.
Considering that the pandemic has effectively broken overseas supply chains, this would be the perfect time to switch to domestic production. It would help the job markets too.
Most international supply chains are unaffected by the pandemic. Looking at the UK in particular, Brexit had a bigger impact on supply chains than the pandemic, but even there (IIRC the UK is short of about 100k truck drivers and having problems even with some domestic supply chains) the international supply chains are mostly still in place.
We are going to see major shortages in the coming months. I work in IT infrastructure and we were told by suppliers that there are going to be major delays in equipment orders due to the pandemic disrupting the supply chain. This is going to affect multiple industries for the next year or so.
i mean bitcoin mining locations is energy price dependent, and the same applies for AI which is very energy intensive too, and thus AI "wage" is going to be different across the world.
> same applies for AI which is very energy intensive too
Training (building the model/AI) might be, inference (using the model to actually "run" the AI) is relatively cheap, I think. This may change with massive models, but I suspect power usage of the AI will not be a major concern for deciding where to put AI-operated factories.
training once vs. millions of inferences. And tomorrow inference may naturally include incremental training. Human brain consumes 20% of the body energy. I don't think AI will come to human brain energy efficiency soon, and thus i think AI (and its accessories, ie. like 3d/AR/VR model spaces where and what AI will be operating with) will be a major, if not main, energy consumer going forward. When Google self-driving car passes by the main sound coming from it isn't the engine nor the tires :)
Wages aren’t the only cost, and it isn’t clear how good and AI would need to be to fully replace production line workers — it might be that an AI good enough to do that would need to also be good enough to render all human labour obsolete, including ours.
Mostly sand for the silicium. A little doping materials, phosphorous, arsenic. If you want to get fancy, cadmium, tellurium and selenium (but mostly that fad is over I think). Aluminium and copper for the frames and connectors, a bit of the usual plastics.
The big issue isn't resources, those are either present anyways or needed in very small quantities (dopants). The big problem is electricity for splitting up silicium oxide (sand) into usable silicium by electrolysis. You can do it in Germany, but then the power used will be mostly from lignite, so not very green most of the time.
Oh, and I forgot, glass for the cover. But again, mostly sand and heat.
So any place that does pretty much anything with aluminum should already be fairly well set up then? Especially if they already had some sand pits that used to make auto glass but have sat idle the last 50 years...
Describing my rural area of West TN. Dunno much about making solar cells, but now im wanting to learn more.
The "making silicium" part is indeed similar enough to making aluminium that there shouldn't be much of a problem there. It needs lots of electricity, but isn't terribly hard. The complicated part is in growing silicium monocristals, slicing them up, doping them, adding contacts and concentrators, etc. Kind of like building microchips, only that the structures are in mm sizes instead of nm.
"No two the same color" was a problem in the early days of solar. That meant the coating process wasn't being controlled properly. About two decades ago I went to a talk by the head of Applied Materials solar where he mentioned that. They built IC fab equipment, where poor coating control is total batch fail.
I mean hell, local could even just mean "same continent" or "within a X hundred km radius". The real key is that there's no reason for such excessive energy waste from transportation due to facilities being on the opposite side of the globe when it's easily producible locally.
>there's no reason for such excessive energy waste from transportation
Shipping by air, land, or sea, has radically different costs. Since time immemorial transport by water has been tremendously less expensive than the alternative.
I was curious, so I looked up some figures, which probably aren't very precise, but shipping a ton of stuff from Shanghai to Los Angeles (if you can put 29 tons in a 40-foot container) costs on the order of $500. By air, maybe $20,000.
People say shipping things around the world is wasteful, but 25 cents is completely different from 10 dollars a pound. Going inland can easily exceed the cost of a leisurely trip across an ocean.
But if you still have to go inland, it's the same problem but worse. Sure places on the coast can get cheaper/less wasteful goods by water but once you have to take those goods inland you have the same dilemma. At least with local production you only have to worry about the last X miles rather than those last X miles plus maritime travel.
Additionally, local transport doesn't preclude using waterways. There's plenty of viable river shipping lanes in most regions not exposed to the coast but once again the last mile is going to probably be by road.
So local production can still happen on the coasts but by making it local you free up whatever percentage of international maritime traffic that could either be used for something else or go unused and save some amount of pollution.
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Side note but if we want to cut down on pollution why isn't there a bigger push to replace diesel propulsion with nuclear propulsion in commercial vessels? Just a quick search and it looks like Maritime shipping accounts for something like 13% of Sulphur emissions, 15% of NOx emissions, and 3% of CO2 emissions. That seems like a pretty big/easy way to cut down on atmospheric and greenhouse gas pollution from a global standpoint.
I think the Sulphur and NOx emissions are that high because ocean ships are using lower grade fuel with lots of Sulphur (many times more than regular Diesel fuel) and have no NOx reduction devices like a regular truck. It is possible to reduce Sulphur and NOx emissions an order of magnitude just by making ships EURO 6-equivalent compliant. That would increase the shipping cost a bit, but it will still be the cheapest by far, the $500 per container from Shanghai to LA will go $520 or $550.
Germany once had a flourishing industry producing solar panels. Domestic demand was high, supply followed, driven by high subsidies to home-owners producing solar electricity. For a few years all was fine, until Chinese manufacturers provided lower-priced panels. Instead of protecting domestic manufacturing through import duties (which would have been justified because Chinese were dumping below cost at times), the government stood by and did nothing.
Now politicians are crying about the long way panels travel over from China and that we no longer have domestic manufacturing...
From clicking around a little, it seems they were bought by elecnor, who seem to, among other things, use the solar panels to build power plants. So they found a buyer who just bought its own manufacturer, selling the excess on the side. Nonetheless, half the models they are offering seem to be made in China.
As I see it, there are a couple of reasons German manufacturers couldn't regain competitiveness during this period:
- The scale of their operations is too small. The largest Chinese manufacturers operate at a different order of magnitude.
- Making comparable products at the same scale, Chinese products would still tend to cost less. For the same reasons that you can get a made-in-China toaster cheaper than a made-in-Germany one.
At its peak, leading German manufacturer SolarWorld had capacity to produce about 1,400 megawatts of modules per year:
That's smaller than the Chinese behemoths but still large enough to compete internationally.
What I have seen from the EU is that even ambitions for new solar gigafactories are too small -- 1000-3000 megawatts of annual capacity. That still won't get costs within spitting distance of First Solar or the big Asian manufacturers. Part of the reason for the limited ambition is that there is no EU-wide consensus favoring "European" solar products. Germany wants to boost German solar manufacturing. France wants to boost French solar manufacturing. Spain wants to boost Spanish manufacturing. Individual countries only care about the EU policies so far as they favor that country; neither Spain nor Greece is particularly interested in policies boosting European solar manufacturing if the manufacturing ends up regionally concentrated in e.g. Italy. So these smaller solar manufacturers are stuck in a local maximum where they survive on political considerations (at least for a while) but can't grow to scales where they would be internationally competitive.
Yes, mostly you are right, nowadays. Problem is, imho, only in 2007 or 2008 China surpassed Germany in production (I can't find a source atm, just from memory). That would have been the right time for the EU involvement, but they took 5 more years where German manufacturers were hung out to dry.
I have seen a lot of press about perovskite solar panels. They fail via reaction with assorted atmospheric gasses = short life, but very low cost. They are at work on sealed panels? In addition, I have seen press on multi-layer flexible panels.
The combined perovskite and multi spectral and flexible is nearing 50% - but is not 20 year rated, however if they can reach a 10 year life rating along with the flexible aspect, this will lead to shippable rolls that are locally integrated with local glass. Plastic might also serve if they can make it fully gas proof.
Locally produced "everything" is the future. Just in time manufacturing and delivery is great if you have the tolerance for occasional complete failures and slow restarts.
But those occasional failures cause people to get creative or to change their priorities (being willing to pay a bit more for a product that they know they can always get, not just one they can get cheaply when everything is going according to plan). This also applies to food.
You can’t continue to use unsustainable farming practices. The local future of farming will be combinations of permaculture food forests in public spaces, rooftop gardens, vertical high efficiency (closed system) farms, etc.
Centralization seems like a stronger force than decentralization, eg FANG. Whole Foods used to check the "change your priorities" box, but we know how that ended.
The key fact here, buried in the middle of the article, is that the cost of shipping modules from Asia to Europe accounts for about 10% of their cost†. So, if protectionist measures are imposed, or if war breaks out and container ships start sinking, or if module costs keep falling, locally produced solar modules are the future; otherwise, they're not.
It's possible that the German factory that paid for this PR puff-piece will be able to bring their cost to within 10% of that of Chinese vendors, or even lower. If that happens, the result won't be a world of locally-produced solar modules; the result will be a world of German-produced solar modules, and there may be articles in the Chinese press lamenting how China is now importing PV modules from Germany.
Generally things are locally produced when shipping costs, tariffs, or risks would make overseas-produced versions economically uncompetitive. Potable water (0.03¢/kg) is usually locally produced at the 10km scale. Construction sand (3¢/kg) and aggregate (1¢/kg) and liquid oxygen and nitrogen are locally produced at the 100km scale. (The liquid gases are expensive to ship because they boil off during shipping.) Portland cement (10¢/kg), natural gas, and electrical energy are locally produced at the 1000km scale. Things that cost more than US$1/kg are, by and large, not locally produced.
PV modules cost about US$2/kg, so if shipping costs stay the same and war doesn't break out, we shouldn't expect to see them locally produced in non-protectionist countries until their price falls by another order of magnitude or so, maybe in 8–16 years.
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† I think the real number is closer to 5% than 10% (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598814), but the article carefully avoided including any objectively verifiable numbers so we could find out whether I'm overlooking something.
I’m really starting to wonder about the collective value of skilled factory jobs and how that isn’t factored in to value calculations in typical USA business logic.
Like, with locally made solar panels you have some high paying jobs and those people will spend that money locally. With foreign made solar panels you have low paying warehouse and distribution jobs moving around foreign goods and most money goes overseas.
So yeah 10x cost is maybe still too much. But I suppose the actual figure depends on how value is calculated. I think it’s kinda wild the USA invested billions to build factories in China and now they can produce cheap goods and regular people in the USA can barely afford to live.
>I’m really starting to wonder about the collective value of skilled factory jobs and how that isn’t factored in to value calculations in typical USA business logic.
Because typical businesses are making decisions for themselves, and not their whole industry or economy?
Colluding with other businesses to try to achieve a collective goal might well even be illegal.
Right, but there's no natural law that says we need to structure business or our economy this way. We can form collectives that make decisions based on what the whole group thinks is best. We can federate collectives or make all manner of different arrangements. You have to understand, people are freezing to death after sleeping raw because they have no shelter. People are dying because they can't afford medical bills. It's worth asking ourselves if we're really doing the right thing.
Either you have government action that forces all businesses to adhere to certain rules, or you get the rules that help each business to be as competitive as possible. If there is more profit to be made by shipping stuff from China and there are no global rules discouraging that, than any company which does not do it will eventually be outcompeted.
This is a false binary. There is a third way - collectively owned firms or institutions which represent a federation of collectively owned firms. That is the arrangement that I am most interested in and the one where the price is less important than the overall impact to society.
>You have to understand, people are freezing to death after sleeping raw because they have no shelter.
I assume you understand the reasons there are people who live in an apartment on disability without working, but others are homeless. You may want to spell it out to make sure we are on the same page.
I'm wondering if you are drawing on specific personal experience and think you understand the crux of the problem. Could you state it if so.
>People are dying because they can't afford medical bills.
Which implies that EMTALA, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, etc. are insufficient, so do you have a specific gap and/or thing to fill the gap in mind?
>It's worth asking ourselves if we're really doing the right thing.
Saying that to a random person on the internet kind of implies you don't think most people ask themselves that all the time.
I agree with you — and there must be a name for this kind of thinking. I was going to jokingly call you a "red" but, kidding aside, it's not even close to Communism. You're suggesting something more akin to forward-looking Capitalism.
Actually it's interesting. There have always been those who believed in voluntary communism and opposed capital "C" "Communism" where the state controls everything. These people have identified as "libertarian communists" or "anarchist communists" where "anarchist" does not mean "chaos" or anything of the sort, but describes a process of questioning and dismantling hierarchy, replacing it with collectively governed voluntary systems.
I recently had a conversation with someone about this who is a libertarian capitalist, and they found a few videos I shared intriguing, so I've just put them into a playlist to share with you. It starts with a 2 minute video that describes things in high level terms and then subsequent videos provide more detail. I think you might like it!
Now that I think about it. The whole capitalism vs communism debate is stupid. The flaws in capitalism are obvious and simple. Everything derives from it, even communism. Instead of fixing the leaking pipe everyone tries to build something akin to a teleportation system to catch all the leaking drops of water to send them back into the water tower so that they can leak out again and be caught by the system.
Kids, your money is broken. Money is the mirror image of debt and someone took that mirror image hostage. You still need the mirror image. The only thing you can do is shrug and create a new mirror image by creating new debt until the day the hostage is returned.
What if you don't want to create new debt? Rescue the hostage. That will never happen because people will deny reality for as long as possible. It actually takes someone who will force reality upon you, either the US government or the Fed. The former is prone to denying reality as well. The latter is unable to force reality onto people.
If denying reality is the fundamental problem then no ideology will ever fix it. Communism will suffer from other problems because it is just a different mechanism, it didn't change the humans that are part of it.
Denying reality is what allows it to continue, but the root of the problem is the structure of power in the world. The goal of libertarian communism is to decentralize power as much as is feasible and give people a say in their own lives.
So getting people to face reality is a key part of making the necessary changes. This is why all revolutionary ideologies include education as one of the first steps. So yes, if you cannot educate then you cannot make changes which require voluntary collective agreement. But I don't think it's impossible to educate. The real problem is that counter-revolutionary forces have a lot of money and power to "educate" in their own way, and manipulate us in to accepting unjust systems.
In its simplest form, anarchism is a process of questioning existing power structures. And some are legitimate and can be justified. But those that have no legitimate purpose must be dismantled. Libertarian communism is a method of organization that aims to build a foundation for an economy without massive power imbalances.
Really, I'd encourage you to look at the playlist I linked in my above comment, and let me know what you think.
You're talking about what promotes the welfare of society, fundamentally a normative question hinging on our conception of "welfare", while I was talking about what the patterns of world trade are and will be in the future, and what causes affect them, a factual question. I did not intend to deprecate the importance of skilled factory jobs to the welfare of society. In fact, my comment didn't touch on normative questions at all.
I think that, in order to formulate a strategy to promote some set of objectives, as you are trying to do, you must first have a correct factual understanding of the causal relations of cause and effect that relate to those objectives. Whatever strategy you formulate will only have a tendency to promote your objectives, whatever they are, to the extent that your factual understanding of the causal structure of the system you are trying to affect is correct.
Therefore, factual analysis of the relevant causal structure is epistemologically prior to any such normative analysis of strategies.
If your factual understanding is sufficiently incorrect, as in Tales of the Black Freighter, the strategy you formulate can easily have the opposite effect of what you intend. This is especially likely if your factual beliefs are being manipulated by other players whose objectives do not align with your own; this article seems to be an attempt at such manipulation.
No, your epistemological understanding is factually incorrect and causally manipulated by the normative nature of your strategic objectives.
Actually the higher goal of such structural alignments is a regressive conceptualization of the historically ascendant conjunction of the CCP.
In other words, shit mammoth.
If you don't know what those words mean, you can look them up in a dictionary. If you're looking to make fun of people for knowing things you don't, whether words or anything else, maybe you're on the wrong website. Or in the wrong species.
I am happy to see a friendly competition to reduce CO2. It’d be cool to see people questioning in the papers about why they can’t be more environmentally friendly.
I gotta be honest your comment is difficult to read. I know what all the words mean, but your sentence structure and word choice make it seem to me to be overly complicated. Idk if it's just because I am a non-academic. Anyway just wanted to give you my honest feedback.
I can't disagree. I probably should have put more effort into clarifying it, though that probably would have made it a lot longer. Still, I think you'll find it rewarding to work through it to understand what it's saying. You might try thinking of the examples of the phenomena it describes that I should have included—and counterexamples.
1) That you weren't talking about normative issues. I get that. Normative issues have been on my mind lately and I wanted to add my thoughts.
The rest of your comment seems plainly true so I wasn't sure what to say really.
2) I must understand the facts properly in order to succeed. If I do not understand the facts, I or others will suffer unintended consequences. This is clearly true.
3) I must work to understand and counteract propaganda from others. I first began to question my beliefs after listening to Noam Chomsky. Clear critiques of the structures of power and how they affect the media and propaganda are key aspects of his philosophy, so I am aware of this.
> I probably should have put more effort into clarifying it, though that probably would have made it a lot longer.
Personally I think you could make it clearer by using fewer, simpler words. But I speak using simple clear words so of course I would think that. Anyway I don't mean to sound too critical, just sharing my thoughts.
In fact, your strategy can forward your goals with no causal connection to what you want to change, either by sheer luck, or because your rhetoric inspires people to do the Right Thing by some completely different means.
But I agree, of course, that these are not to be counted on.
How does Germany manage to export $110.34B to China? Your arguments seem reasonable, but it seems that the ultimate conclusion is that Germany cannot export anything as China would do it cheaper. Does this situation also apply to other countries like the USA? Is not possible to compete with China anymore?
It is possible to compete with China on things that require special knowledge and are rarely needed. "Special knowledge" because China doesn't have the local skills to produce it (yet). "Rarely needed" because China didn't prioritize acquiring said knowledge. Case in point: Germany mostly exports production machinery (rarely needed, last forever, very special knowledge) and luxury automobiles (rarely needed, last quite some time, some special knowledge needed (mostly on how to appear "luxury")).
But in general, I firmly believe that western nations with high social, environmental, legal standards cannot compete with China, except in areas where China didn't yet have the chance to catch up for some reason. I think we are going back to a world where most nations know how to produce almost everything, so competition will no longer be on that knowledge but more on the other necessary factors to make production cheaper.
There are many things that Germany and the USA can do more cheaply than China, and those are the things they currently export to China. This can happen because of local skills and knowledge, for example, or because of natural resources such as brines and geothermal energy that are uneconomic to ship overseas for processing, or because of existing capital investments like those in the Richardson Grating Lab in Rochester, New York, or because of favorable regulatory environments like California's prohibition on contractual employer ownership of the work products of employees outside work hours.
There's the Ricardian comparative advantage argument: even if, say, China can produce N95 masks more efficiently than the US, the US might still be able to export N95 masks to China, if all the Chinese are so busy producing more profitable products like solar panels and microchips that they don't have time to also produce N95 masks, as manifested by Chinese wages rising too high for N95-mask factories to produce N95 masks at competitive prices.
However, this does not seem to be the case at present. If anything, the situation is reversed: there are things Germany imports from China, even though Germany could make them domestically from less inputs, because German wages are higher than Chinese wages.
The Germans save a lot and they refuse to increase public debt which means some other government has to take on that debt. Germany's ability to export its products is actually just its ability to export debts which is only a matter of how far you are willing to go vs your competitors. If everyone followed this strategy there would be no world economy.
Besides that we had some form of solar cell production here, only to outsource it to China decades ago. Much to the lamenting of the locals. Same for wind turbines. It's all embedded in the pork cycle/boom-bust scheme embedded in the maze of federal/state subsidies, policies and whatnot else.
The thing you and other commenters seem to be missing: there are no environmental impact studies on panels produced in China. They're not letting anyone near their production sites. So called Chinese environmental studies are the actual PR pieces here. Meanwhile Chinese rivers tell the tale.
German manufacturing obeys far, far more stringent environmental parameters and is consequently more expensive. Its worth paying the premium if we want solar because of the climate.
What part of China do you live in where the production sites are somewhere other than in the middle of a major city?
One significant difference between environmental regulatory regimes in Germany and China is that in Germany there is no death penalty for polluters.
Regardless, my comment wasn't about what would be good or bad or what was worth paying or whether the environmental costs of Chinese PV manufacturing are 9% higher than those of Europe or 13% higher or 90% lower, and according to what measures (information you somehow seem to have forgotten to include in your comment too). It was about what economic circumstances must obtain for local production of PV modules to be economically competitive with modules shipped in from overseas, whether the modules are shipped from Germany, from China, or from Indonesia.
I just put 15kW worth of solar on my roof and chose panels made in Washington State (Silfab) over imported (Hanwha).
The price difference for the panels was negligible. The Silfabs were produced locally and look better on your roof. They also have a great reputation for quality. I was surprised at how competitive the American/Canadian panels are with Asian imports.
For us homeowners, the largest variation in cost isn't going to be panels anyway - it's going to be who you use to install them. The prices for various installers were sometimes over 2x the price of the cheapest installers, with no difference in quality of work.
If you want to minimize your solar costs, optimize for finding the best installer.
I just got a quote for a 15kW system at 1.48/W installed through project solar, and I still can't get the numbers to work out for me. I am west of the Cascades, though. Near Portland. It seems like something you have to do for some other reason than ROI. Like because it's fun.
I'm considering still doing something, but making it more hobby-level, maybe a 5k ground mount DIY so I'm not throwing so much at a toy.
We used Blossom Solar which was affordable and did a great job.
We got a loan at a very low interest rate and the payment is about the same as our power bill was. It helps that Seattle has net metering, so we didn’t need to build a battery wall and can offset our winter energy use by generating it in summer.
Our electric rates go up faster than inflation, and so in a year or two our costs will be lower than they would have been without solar, and will remain so for at least a few decades.
I may try again when my roof gets replaced. Right now the numbers don't work because I've only got about 15 years left on my roof. So for a 20K investment, I'd break even in about 10 years, then get 5 years before the system needs to be replaced (the panels will still have value, but it seems like the cost of the labor for uninstall/reinstall will dwarf that).
So for a 15 year timeline, all I need to get is about 3% from a regular investment, and if I do better, then I should do that instead of solar. The numbers may be more favorable if I do the solar at the same time I put a new roof on, but mine is only 10 years old so it's early yet.
One of the reasons I'm thinking of a smaller ground-mount system is that it won't have the same time horizon limitations as a roof-mount.
The cost of solar panels is now low enough to be a secondary factor for residential use. In USA and Western Europe, the cost of installing is the biggest expense, also the cost of batteries (for off-grid). In Europe there is also the availability of good quality MPPT, batteries (LiFePO4), converters - there is a lot of 110V equipment on Amazon, not 230V.
So in the overall picture, for residential installations the cost of the solar panels is not an issue, people in Europe can afford to pay a premium for German-made panels. If the efficiency is higher, that premium is well deserved, I know the efficiency of solar panels is continuously increasing, today we have more than 50% more efficient panels than 10 years ago and those were 50-100% more efficient than another 10 years ago (the base was very low, it allowed for such huge increases).
Oxford PV is moving toward the initial stage of its production plans for its crystalline silicon heterojunction/perovskite tandem PV cells. The company’s initial 100 cell line, installed at a former CIGS solar module factory in the town of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, will produce 100 MW of the tandem cells – which may push efficiencies beyond 30% in the future
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadOf course you can be competitive when your startup cost has a significant devaluation step.
As I understand it, most things are produced in China because of low wages. But AI has the same wage everywhere around the world: 0.
Plus, robots aren't necessarily better at making things. Tesla, for example, rolled back its fully automated production line because it wasn't as adaptable as humans are.
not really - look at BTC.
kinda like china with bitcoin mining...
Training (building the model/AI) might be, inference (using the model to actually "run" the AI) is relatively cheap, I think. This may change with massive models, but I suspect power usage of the AI will not be a major concern for deciding where to put AI-operated factories.
The big issue isn't resources, those are either present anyways or needed in very small quantities (dopants). The big problem is electricity for splitting up silicium oxide (sand) into usable silicium by electrolysis. You can do it in Germany, but then the power used will be mostly from lignite, so not very green most of the time.
Oh, and I forgot, glass for the cover. But again, mostly sand and heat.
Describing my rural area of West TN. Dunno much about making solar cells, but now im wanting to learn more.
Also, don't forget the mounting hardware, which has seen surprising innovation as well. It's a significant part of the cost. Example: https://www.jurchen-technology.com/products/pv-substructures...
Shipping by air, land, or sea, has radically different costs. Since time immemorial transport by water has been tremendously less expensive than the alternative.
I was curious, so I looked up some figures, which probably aren't very precise, but shipping a ton of stuff from Shanghai to Los Angeles (if you can put 29 tons in a 40-foot container) costs on the order of $500. By air, maybe $20,000.
People say shipping things around the world is wasteful, but 25 cents is completely different from 10 dollars a pound. Going inland can easily exceed the cost of a leisurely trip across an ocean.
Additionally, local transport doesn't preclude using waterways. There's plenty of viable river shipping lanes in most regions not exposed to the coast but once again the last mile is going to probably be by road.
So local production can still happen on the coasts but by making it local you free up whatever percentage of international maritime traffic that could either be used for something else or go unused and save some amount of pollution.
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Side note but if we want to cut down on pollution why isn't there a bigger push to replace diesel propulsion with nuclear propulsion in commercial vessels? Just a quick search and it looks like Maritime shipping accounts for something like 13% of Sulphur emissions, 15% of NOx emissions, and 3% of CO2 emissions. That seems like a pretty big/easy way to cut down on atmospheric and greenhouse gas pollution from a global standpoint.
Population centers are disproportionately near the coast/harbors.
This is often mentioned whenever people discuss sea level rise from climate change.
According to the UN, 40% of the entire world's population lives within 60 miles of a coast. I believe the proportion for the US is similar.
I think this is important in understanding why it is feasible and cheap as a % to ship things around the world.
Of course, there are rivers and railroads too.
Now politicians are crying about the long way panels travel over from China and that we no longer have domestic manufacturing...
I don't know how they survived the prices dumping.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/08/31/eu-ends-mip-against-c...
As I see it, there are a couple of reasons German manufacturers couldn't regain competitiveness during this period:
- The scale of their operations is too small. The largest Chinese manufacturers operate at a different order of magnitude.
- Making comparable products at the same scale, Chinese products would still tend to cost less. For the same reasons that you can get a made-in-China toaster cheaper than a made-in-Germany one.
At its peak, leading German manufacturer SolarWorld had capacity to produce about 1,400 megawatts of modules per year:
https://www.printedelectronicsnow.com/contents/view_breaking...
Leading Chinese manufacturer Longi shipped 24,500 megawatts of modules last year:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/22/longi-crowned-king-of...
The only profitable American solar company, First Solar, is also the largest, with 8,000 megawatts of capacity targeted by the end of this year:
https://www.pv-tech.org/first-solar-adding-series-6-module-c...
That's smaller than the Chinese behemoths but still large enough to compete internationally.
What I have seen from the EU is that even ambitions for new solar gigafactories are too small -- 1000-3000 megawatts of annual capacity. That still won't get costs within spitting distance of First Solar or the big Asian manufacturers. Part of the reason for the limited ambition is that there is no EU-wide consensus favoring "European" solar products. Germany wants to boost German solar manufacturing. France wants to boost French solar manufacturing. Spain wants to boost Spanish manufacturing. Individual countries only care about the EU policies so far as they favor that country; neither Spain nor Greece is particularly interested in policies boosting European solar manufacturing if the manufacturing ends up regionally concentrated in e.g. Italy. So these smaller solar manufacturers are stuck in a local maximum where they survive on political considerations (at least for a while) but can't grow to scales where they would be internationally competitive.
But those occasional failures cause people to get creative or to change their priorities (being willing to pay a bit more for a product that they know they can always get, not just one they can get cheaply when everything is going according to plan). This also applies to food.
It's possible that the German factory that paid for this PR puff-piece will be able to bring their cost to within 10% of that of Chinese vendors, or even lower. If that happens, the result won't be a world of locally-produced solar modules; the result will be a world of German-produced solar modules, and there may be articles in the Chinese press lamenting how China is now importing PV modules from Germany.
Generally things are locally produced when shipping costs, tariffs, or risks would make overseas-produced versions economically uncompetitive. Potable water (0.03¢/kg) is usually locally produced at the 10km scale. Construction sand (3¢/kg) and aggregate (1¢/kg) and liquid oxygen and nitrogen are locally produced at the 100km scale. (The liquid gases are expensive to ship because they boil off during shipping.) Portland cement (10¢/kg), natural gas, and electrical energy are locally produced at the 1000km scale. Things that cost more than US$1/kg are, by and large, not locally produced.
PV modules cost about US$2/kg, so if shipping costs stay the same and war doesn't break out, we shouldn't expect to see them locally produced in non-protectionist countries until their price falls by another order of magnitude or so, maybe in 8–16 years.
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† I think the real number is closer to 5% than 10% (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598814), but the article carefully avoided including any objectively verifiable numbers so we could find out whether I'm overlooking something.
Like, with locally made solar panels you have some high paying jobs and those people will spend that money locally. With foreign made solar panels you have low paying warehouse and distribution jobs moving around foreign goods and most money goes overseas.
So yeah 10x cost is maybe still too much. But I suppose the actual figure depends on how value is calculated. I think it’s kinda wild the USA invested billions to build factories in China and now they can produce cheap goods and regular people in the USA can barely afford to live.
Because typical businesses are making decisions for themselves, and not their whole industry or economy?
Colluding with other businesses to try to achieve a collective goal might well even be illegal.
Take a look:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy83SW...
I assume you understand the reasons there are people who live in an apartment on disability without working, but others are homeless. You may want to spell it out to make sure we are on the same page.
I'm wondering if you are drawing on specific personal experience and think you understand the crux of the problem. Could you state it if so.
>People are dying because they can't afford medical bills.
Which implies that EMTALA, Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, etc. are insufficient, so do you have a specific gap and/or thing to fill the gap in mind?
>It's worth asking ourselves if we're really doing the right thing.
Saying that to a random person on the internet kind of implies you don't think most people ask themselves that all the time.
I'm inclined to assume virtually everyone does.
I recently had a conversation with someone about this who is a libertarian capitalist, and they found a few videos I shared intriguing, so I've just put them into a playlist to share with you. It starts with a 2 minute video that describes things in high level terms and then subsequent videos provide more detail. I think you might like it!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anf00e9_YBWy...
Kids, your money is broken. Money is the mirror image of debt and someone took that mirror image hostage. You still need the mirror image. The only thing you can do is shrug and create a new mirror image by creating new debt until the day the hostage is returned.
What if you don't want to create new debt? Rescue the hostage. That will never happen because people will deny reality for as long as possible. It actually takes someone who will force reality upon you, either the US government or the Fed. The former is prone to denying reality as well. The latter is unable to force reality onto people.
If denying reality is the fundamental problem then no ideology will ever fix it. Communism will suffer from other problems because it is just a different mechanism, it didn't change the humans that are part of it.
So getting people to face reality is a key part of making the necessary changes. This is why all revolutionary ideologies include education as one of the first steps. So yes, if you cannot educate then you cannot make changes which require voluntary collective agreement. But I don't think it's impossible to educate. The real problem is that counter-revolutionary forces have a lot of money and power to "educate" in their own way, and manipulate us in to accepting unjust systems.
In its simplest form, anarchism is a process of questioning existing power structures. And some are legitimate and can be justified. But those that have no legitimate purpose must be dismantled. Libertarian communism is a method of organization that aims to build a foundation for an economy without massive power imbalances.
Really, I'd encourage you to look at the playlist I linked in my above comment, and let me know what you think.
I think that, in order to formulate a strategy to promote some set of objectives, as you are trying to do, you must first have a correct factual understanding of the causal relations of cause and effect that relate to those objectives. Whatever strategy you formulate will only have a tendency to promote your objectives, whatever they are, to the extent that your factual understanding of the causal structure of the system you are trying to affect is correct. Therefore, factual analysis of the relevant causal structure is epistemologically prior to any such normative analysis of strategies.
If your factual understanding is sufficiently incorrect, as in Tales of the Black Freighter, the strategy you formulate can easily have the opposite effect of what you intend. This is especially likely if your factual beliefs are being manipulated by other players whose objectives do not align with your own; this article seems to be an attempt at such manipulation.
1) That you weren't talking about normative issues. I get that. Normative issues have been on my mind lately and I wanted to add my thoughts.
The rest of your comment seems plainly true so I wasn't sure what to say really.
2) I must understand the facts properly in order to succeed. If I do not understand the facts, I or others will suffer unintended consequences. This is clearly true.
3) I must work to understand and counteract propaganda from others. I first began to question my beliefs after listening to Noam Chomsky. Clear critiques of the structures of power and how they affect the media and propaganda are key aspects of his philosophy, so I am aware of this.
> I probably should have put more effort into clarifying it, though that probably would have made it a lot longer.
Personally I think you could make it clearer by using fewer, simpler words. But I speak using simple clear words so of course I would think that. Anyway I don't mean to sound too critical, just sharing my thoughts.
But I agree, of course, that these are not to be counted on.
But in general, I firmly believe that western nations with high social, environmental, legal standards cannot compete with China, except in areas where China didn't yet have the chance to catch up for some reason. I think we are going back to a world where most nations know how to produce almost everything, so competition will no longer be on that knowledge but more on the other necessary factors to make production cheaper.
There's the Ricardian comparative advantage argument: even if, say, China can produce N95 masks more efficiently than the US, the US might still be able to export N95 masks to China, if all the Chinese are so busy producing more profitable products like solar panels and microchips that they don't have time to also produce N95 masks, as manifested by Chinese wages rising too high for N95-mask factories to produce N95 masks at competitive prices.
However, this does not seem to be the case at present. If anything, the situation is reversed: there are things Germany imports from China, even though Germany could make them domestically from less inputs, because German wages are higher than Chinese wages.
Seems rather like reporting about what happens in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Saxony
Besides that we had some form of solar cell production here, only to outsource it to China decades ago. Much to the lamenting of the locals. Same for wind turbines. It's all embedded in the pork cycle/boom-bust scheme embedded in the maze of federal/state subsidies, policies and whatnot else.
German manufacturing obeys far, far more stringent environmental parameters and is consequently more expensive. Its worth paying the premium if we want solar because of the climate.
One significant difference between environmental regulatory regimes in Germany and China is that in Germany there is no death penalty for polluters.
Regardless, my comment wasn't about what would be good or bad or what was worth paying or whether the environmental costs of Chinese PV manufacturing are 9% higher than those of Europe or 13% higher or 90% lower, and according to what measures (information you somehow seem to have forgotten to include in your comment too). It was about what economic circumstances must obtain for local production of PV modules to be economically competitive with modules shipped in from overseas, whether the modules are shipped from Germany, from China, or from Indonesia.
Please stop. That is behavior unbecoming of the dignity of a human being.
The price difference for the panels was negligible. The Silfabs were produced locally and look better on your roof. They also have a great reputation for quality. I was surprised at how competitive the American/Canadian panels are with Asian imports.
For us homeowners, the largest variation in cost isn't going to be panels anyway - it's going to be who you use to install them. The prices for various installers were sometimes over 2x the price of the cheapest installers, with no difference in quality of work.
If you want to minimize your solar costs, optimize for finding the best installer.
I'm considering still doing something, but making it more hobby-level, maybe a 5k ground mount DIY so I'm not throwing so much at a toy.
We used Blossom Solar which was affordable and did a great job.
We got a loan at a very low interest rate and the payment is about the same as our power bill was. It helps that Seattle has net metering, so we didn’t need to build a battery wall and can offset our winter energy use by generating it in summer.
Our electric rates go up faster than inflation, and so in a year or two our costs will be lower than they would have been without solar, and will remain so for at least a few decades.
So for a 15 year timeline, all I need to get is about 3% from a regular investment, and if I do better, then I should do that instead of solar. The numbers may be more favorable if I do the solar at the same time I put a new roof on, but mine is only 10 years old so it's early yet.
One of the reasons I'm thinking of a smaller ground-mount system is that it won't have the same time horizon limitations as a roof-mount.
So in the overall picture, for residential installations the cost of the solar panels is not an issue, people in Europe can afford to pay a premium for German-made panels. If the efficiency is higher, that premium is well deserved, I know the efficiency of solar panels is continuously increasing, today we have more than 50% more efficient panels than 10 years ago and those were 50-100% more efficient than another 10 years ago (the base was very low, it allowed for such huge increases).
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/23/oxford-pv-completes-1...
Oxford PV is moving toward the initial stage of its production plans for its crystalline silicon heterojunction/perovskite tandem PV cells. The company’s initial 100 cell line, installed at a former CIGS solar module factory in the town of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, will produce 100 MW of the tandem cells – which may push efficiencies beyond 30% in the future