Comment by uyzstvqs
5 hours ago
> thanks to China
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
Stock vs flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_and_flow
Solar panels and batteries are a stock. Oil is a flow. This leads to a very different dependency situation.
If you're concerned about energy sovereignty, just buy more solar panels now. If you're still concerned, buy even more. Keep buying them until you're not concerned anymore.
Thanks for that link, this says what I've had to explain so many times.
Yes, scare mongering for panels and batteries which last 25 - 50 years or forever with zero input fuel needed after the install. Yay to fossil fuels which are needed continuously, billions of tons per year.
Nobody can prevent your country/region from developing own solar or battery supply chains. Alternatively, buy from other countries that are not China for a little bit more.
https://www.auxsol.com/blog/how-long-do-solar-inverters-last...
" String Inverters: The most common residential choice, lasting 10–15 years on average and boasting impressive cost-performance.
Microinverters: Mounted directly on individual solar panels, these often reach 25 years—nearly matching the lifespan of solar panels themselves. Industry data highlights lower failure rates for microinverters, though they come with a higher upfront cost.
Central Inverters: Typically used for larger residential or commercial and industrial systems, central inverters last 10–15 years. "
Without an solar invertor a solar panel is just a black panel.
https://digitalpower.huawei.com/en/blogs/how-long-will-a-lit...
"Generally, lithium-ion batteries used in ordinary consumer electronics have a cycle life of about 300 to 500 times. After reaching this number of cycles, the battery capacity will drop to about 80% of its initial capacity. For example, if the lithium-ion battery of a smartphone undergoes a full charge-discharge cycle every day, its performance will significantly decline after approximately 1 to 1.5 years.
In contrast, lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles, due to advancements in technology and craftsmanship, can achieve 1,000 to 2,000 charge-discharge cycles, with a correspondingly longer service life of 5 to 8 years or even more. Lithium-ion batteries for data centers have an even longer cycle life of approximately 5,000 cycles and a service life of up to 10 years, meaning there’s no need to replace batteries during the UPS’s full lifecycle. However, these are only theoretical estimates, and the actual service life is affected by various factors."
Damn, those li-ion sure seem like a bad long-term solution. Very convenient that you use lifepo4 for at-home battery storage, and either lifepo4 or possibly sodium for grid scale.
Inverters aren’t a problem. China produces roughly half of them worldwide iirc. They’re dominant but you can source from elsewhere without an issue.
LiFePO4 is almost purely China, but those will last you 20 years, which is roughly 365 times as long as if you’re cut off from oil.
> resulted out of depending on an adversary
being from a 3rd world country and having lived in Europe & the US.
you quickly learn there's nothing called an adversary when adopting technology.
you adopt what works - ruminating about where something comes from, is a luxury.
then after you can either work towards self-sufficiency or keep being vulnerable.
Europe has been kept in this loop of talking about problems while not solving them.
the US - knowin' about the problems, but actively ignoring them due to politics.
Heck China has been in this exact predicament for decades. They imported all the foreign technology they can, while simultaneously learning all they can to make things themselves and stop being dependent. After 50 years it's finally paying off. They could not be where they are now had they blocked all foreign imports from the start.
Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.
> solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance
Most countries have days to, at most, months of imports of oil in reserve. In contrast, a panel embargo wouldn’t have disastrous effects for years. But reliance it is the same. If you’re dependent on Chinese panels, China can cap your energy growth at whim. The degradation will be slow thereafter, but present nevertheless.
Using foreign panels for anything other than bootstrapping domestic or allied production would be the EU repeating its follies first with Russia and then with American LNG.
Stopping new panels in some hypothetical scenario is very different than stopping fossil fuel delivery when ch can stop ongoing energy production - it not even in the same timescale of problem
What are the alternatives for Europe? Continue to import oil and gas? Have some of your most important economic inputs price and supply controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs alive?
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
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The EU has the talent to ramp local production of panels and batteries in years, which as the parent said is how long a panel or battery embargo would take to really cause a crisis.
I mean the EU has ASML, the Large Hadron Collider, and ITER, among other things. There is no engineering talent problem.
If they couldn’t do it it’s a political problem.
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But there is some valid concern around internet-connected PV / battery power electronics getting bricked remotely.
Power electronics shall never be connected to the "Internet".
Any such installations of solar panels, batteries and the like must be interconnected only in a private network without Internet access.
For remote monitoring and control a proxy mini-PC must be used, to which one should use an authenticated and encrypted connection.
For any competent person, this is trivial to do today, to ensure that even if some electronic device includes a backdoor for its vendor that backdoor cannot be accessed.
If there exists any kind of wireless connection provided by the vendor for a device, it must be disabled, e.g. by removing any internal or external antennas. Unlike wired connections that can be filtered externally, wireless connections cannot be secured.
It can stop working properly if the chinese panel is encryption locked to a chinese cloud which is the case with many residential installations.
My Chinese built inverter functions just fine without Internet, but I'd have to take over doing what Amber Energy are doing if I lost access to the cloud.
But that's residential scale: at grid scale these things wouldn't be online in the same way anyway.
Source?
Not the panel itself, but the firmware of the solar panel charge controller and inverter that's connected to the Internet because there's an app to monitor the system. I wouldn't bet that there aren't remote kill switches deep inside that firmware.
The panels and controllers are mostly interchangeable are they not?
They've found some of those in the wild. They weren't that deep.
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> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.
You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.
Germany was a pioneer in manufacturing solar panels ans has let China take over. Their Maglev train is also only running in China.
German industry does not want to pay anyone, imports cheap foreigners for tasks that have to be done in Germany and outsources the rest.
China copied the US. Now the US should copy China. At least with some things, like industrial policy.
The US had copied lot of British technology in late 18th and 19th centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution_in_the_U...
Chinese industrial policy: dominate world of manufacturing (consumer goods, light industry, heavy industry, hardware, software , everything), aquire technology and know-how by any means necessary (buy technology, companies, joint-ventures, espionage, send students abroad and return them), move supply chains as much as possible to China (buy raw minerals, mines, mining rights, ship ores back to China for refining and processing), become independent of other countries as much as possible (prefer domestic coal, gas, oil, domestic synthetic fuels, in the long term minimalize all imports).
In a snap of a finger, Big C will absolutely cut your fingers off and the technology you love off in order to fuel its imperialistic whims. Anything bordering the South China Sea is in their mind, already theirs, you know because of ancient empires or something.
I'm happy the OP was able to take advantage of the current prices, cheap technology, and the amicable perfidious relationship. I would avoid anything internet-connected for good reason, and of course, burying anything in our infrastructure.
This is _completely_ different.
If Russia stops gas deliveries you are immediately without energy.
If China stops exporting your PV and battery while just continue to work for 20 years.
This really seems like straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.
Sure, it's great to be independent when you can, but of all the groups you depend on, and all the ways you depend on them, this doesn't rank high!
This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.
Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.
Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.
Yes, it’s amazing the things you can see fitting into this same mold once you realize that many of our issues in this country are due to old men (and old companies) holding onto power when they should really let the next generation take control.
it would be pretty straightforward to match up panels from any source to controllers free m local national sources
What exactly can China do after you buy their solar panels and batteries? Tell you that you should stop using them to turn sun into electricity and batteries to store them?
By all means, it would be great if EU countries ramp up their own production of batteries and solar panels. But this is worlds apart of depending on fuel from Russia.
How about you focus on increasing your own cheap production first instead of focusing on whether depency is problematic?
Dependency is only problematic if you lack an alternative, and nobody is developing alternatives.
My gawd, lots of people in Netherlands want to contribute to the green ecosystem but govt can't even get permitting straight and everything is gridlocked. The electric grid is full and new houses and companies can't be connected to the grid, wnd if you want to install a heat pump or an AC then there are thousands of rules and anybody else in the neighborhood can block you for the slightest thing.
Less talking and more doing. The Chinese at least are all do and almost no talk.
sodium, unlike oil, is availible everywhere, along with silicone/sand which ,thanks to China for showing the way!,can be bootstrapped into a fully fosil fuelless grid. lets be clear, this is not like setting up a city on mars, this is in the determined hobbiest in there garage level tech so buy from China TODAY, heck, they will even sell you a turn key factory to build your own stuff!, also, TODAY!
The fearmongering around China is truly wild.
If you buy a solar panel, it produces power for the next 20-50 years. It doesn't require constant flow from China. If China suddenly decides to stop buying solar panels (why would they?) then what? Nothing. Your solar panels still produce power.
It's particularly bizarre when the alternative is supply lines to countries like Russia and the GCC countries. Russia tried to use Europe's natural gas dependency to invade Ukraine. That's still ongoing.
And what has China done that warrants a similar kind of fear? Absolutely nothing other than the US has declared China an enemy for some reason.
All Europe has to do is let young people become billionaires with limited liability and an unencumbered team selection.
I know it sounds like satire, but there is a good reason tech exploded in the US 30 years ago while Europe is still making cars like it's the 1960's.
And how incredibly beneficial that has been to society at large, oh boy. Definitely something we need more of!
Ironically HN itself is a marketing campaign for VC billionaires.
So boycott HN?
Tech exploding in the US brought us lots of activity, but arguably not that much progress.
I mean, it's the backbone of the American economy and the reason most people here live comfortable lives. If we wanna virtue signal for upvotes sure, but if we pull the numbers pretty much everyone here is pressing buttons indoors all day and getting ~$200k for it.
Except our European counterparts, they still get ~$75k for it. But I guess "progress" because if they lose their job and bake bread instead not much in their life will change...
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I'd much rather live in europe, having experienced both cultures. I don't have any problem with people earning wealth from selling goods and services, but I could do without people who want to be billionaires simply to be a billionaire.