Comment by jonplackett
2 days ago
> Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.
I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?
Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.
Not to mention that 20 years is enough time to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers. The issue with oil is it requires a constant flow of resources from specific locations in the world that are blessed by geography. Solar power has much less of that going on.
It's possible, but you may have noticed that out of the ≈200 countries in the world, over the last 20 years, about 180 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers, and about 100 of them have completely failed to develop a native industry of anything, continuing their agrarian and resource-extraction economies more or less as they have been for centuries, just with imported Chinese cellphones. People in those countries often blame the rich countries for keeping them down, for example by selling them goods at lower prices than their domestic production of those goods, and they're not completely wrong, but in many cases the dynamics preventing them from escaping that equilibrium are mostly internal.
Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.
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Can you build an industrial plant to build the panels only using solar power?
How and from where do you source the necessary primary materials for such an endeavor?
If you try to answer those questions you will see that you are bullshiting yourself.
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It's more banal than that. Oil you have to pay for. Which for most countries you need to constantly come up with foreign currency. If you have a financial crisis like hot money flees you end up at the mercy of the world banking systems mafia enforcers the IMF.
With solar and electrified transport and industry? Can't pay the loans for the solar panels? Sucks for the saps that loaned you the money. Come and take them.
Come on, be serious. The IMF doesn't break anyone's legs. The worst they can do is refuse to loan you any more money. Any sovereign state is free to balance their own budget and tell the IMF to GTFO.
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> China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.
But that very much isn't a consequence of geology. Ramping up panel production is much easier than discovering oil deposits when there aren't any to discover.
Solar panels are not that hard to produce. China just does it cheaper than other countries. Any industrialized country can easily set up the necessary infrastructure if they choose to do so for strategic reasons.
They’re not hard to produce but they are hard to produce really cheap as in as cheap as China. For lots of reasons (state aid being one, extreme competition being another).
It’s hard in a capitalist country to do things that don’t make business sense - eg long term thinking. So I don’t see any reasonable route where China isn’t still making all the panels any time soon.
As long as China keeps making the panels and selling them for cheap there is no problem at all with that. When they decide to stop doing that other countries can pick up after a short ramp up time, for a little more money.
Solar panels can be locally recycled. Oil cannot.
Of course if you don't build up a local solar industry you are still dependent on foreign countries but it's not that China has an unchanging monopoly on the solar industry.
Solar panel recycling has never really been done at scale. And a country would need fairly advanced manufacturing capabilities first before they could conduct that recycling.
Are old solar panels available at scale? They last for decades.
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The US used to produce tons of solar panels, and LiFePO4 batteries too, but we let those industries fail. (I've been to quite a few plant auctions. It's sad, picking through the bones of random tools and support equipment, but nobody's bidding on the big crown-jewel machines because they had one purpose and that simply doesn't work in our market anymore.)
There are still a few solar panel plants in the US, but nothing like we had.
At the very least it has solved it for China, and that is one key driving force of their moves in this area.
Whether that makes a global conflict more or less likely is an interesting question.
> China produces pretty much all the solar panels
Why didn't other countries build up solar industries? Were busy with fossils? Were too greedy to subsidise?
Man, Paul Krugman (here's a trigger for people who know they know better than him to respond that he's a hack!) was writing about the US giving up lead of solar tech to China back during the G. W. Bush admin... (which makes me feel old as hell)
In 1979 Jimmy Carter installed solar (thermal) panels on the White House roof as part of his fairly progressive environmental and fuel efficiency policies.
Now I feel old :/
And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.
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Like everything else in manufacturing, economy of scale wins.
There's been plenty of subsidization efforts, but they made the mistake of subsidizing technologies that were too innovative and too early on in the scaling curve. e.g. Solyndra with CIGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra
> Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.
"Massive cost reduction in the existing, boring, process" beat "new technology". Possibly for the best in this case, since CIGS and CdTe are poisonous in a way that polysilicon isn't.
Apparently the Chinese solar industry are baffled by the US obsession with Solyndra.
It makes so little objective sense to be that angry about a failed investment in new tech that they thought there was something deeper going on that they didn't understand.
edit: I tried to Google for the source of this, but was stymied by the fact that Solyndra tried to sue Chinese manufacturers.
I did find this time capsule commentary on an NYT piece about how Chinese renewables were about to collapse back in 2012:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/ch...
The story, the blog take and the unhinged comments do a lot to explain USA losing out.
Not that all of the comments are unhinged, one upvoted to the top actually applies basic economic thinking and suggests this is just counteracting negative externalities and therefore the smart move to anyone with the eyes to see the facts clearly.
Second edit: extra context is that the blogger is funded by Charles Koch:
https://www.desmog.com/mercatus-center/
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You forgot being too concerned with maintaining environmental and air quality regulations.
There's a reason Shanghai is known for really bad air quality. There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating
> maintaining environmental and air quality regulations
Yeah, that's the primary concern for the US, right.
> There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating
If you wanted to say that they "produce solar panels with energy from fossils" bring your sources please.
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We let big corporations run things and they just do what’s best for short term profit.
Long term thinking in the west is like 5 years. Long term thinking in China is 100+ years.
Point the finger at yourself. Why didn't you personally build and operate a plant?
Why would you expect different behavior from others?
I did personally build and operate a plant. Literally.
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China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.
China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.
> China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.
Source? From everything I can find, at this moment China has around half of the generation coming from clean/renewable sources.
Per-country yes China is #1, but per-capita, oil producing countries are most of the top 10 (with island nation Palau #1, inefficient transport skewed by low population).
Surely, at some point in the near future, they'll be producing solar panels using solar energy?
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China is also one of the top two countries by population. The other is India, at almost exactly the same number of 1.4bn.
For goods we consume, though.