Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 hours ago
> 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.
> Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from?
Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled). Since it is about 1% of the energy cost, that’s pretty inexpensive.
Also, uranium comes from suppliers on 4 different continents, there is little chance that it becomes unavailable overnight.
> Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled).
What’s stopping us from stockpiling solar panels?
Where do you get the uranium processed so you can use it your reactors...
Importantly, it used to be Germany which had all the expertise, until the CDU government destroyed much of the German solar industry over night. It's funny how everyone always talks about Germany stopping Nuclear energy but nobody ever talks about the fact that subsequent German governments destroyed the renewables industry twice (and they are talking about it again), largely due to lobbying from the coal, Nuclear and car industries. Definitely an interesting what if
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.
I’m more concerned that we do not have the supply chain. Like, sure, we have people who can build solar panels, but are the components local? I wouldn’t expect so, we would very likely import from china. Developing effective supply chains takes decades, it’s not really something you can do right away with the level of precision required by modern technology
Look at how fast various nations ramped up advanced (for the time) military production before and during WWII, or the Manhattan Project, or the Apollo program, or China's rapid rise.
Engineers who know how to build factories, batteries, and solar panels could sit down and create a "war plan" to build out and scale infrastructure quickly if you asked them to do it and then got out of the way.
The EU has plenty of talent with the know-how to do this. If it couldn't be done even in a crisis situation, that's a political problem.
panels themselves are highly simplified chip-like production. silicon crystals and some dopants. anyone can make extruded aluminum. anyone can build power electronics, make copper or aluminum wire.
the only interesting parts here from a supply chain perspective are power transistors. europeans have been known to design these, but idk how easy it would be to start producing them locally. they have macroscopic feature sizes though.
it would take several years of iteration to get a functioning pipeline that ran at volume, but none of this is hugely complicated. certainly not decades.
the real problem is financialization. you have to float that plant with the understanding that its not going to be competitive.