Lots of big jumps in the article and the devil is in the details. Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar could have been deemed as non-viable. Some panel technologies are really hard to recycle but have held a performance edge at different times in solar tech development. Sometimes going all-in on mass production of something is not worth the short-term savings.
Simply pumping out tons of 30 year old technology may have stunted that progress or even created so much waste that solar could have been deemed as non-viable.
When has ramping up an industry from expensive luxury to commodity ever stunted the progress? Lithium ion batteries, liquid crystal displays, oled displays, integrated components, computer memory, the list where exactly the opposite happened is enormous.
This seems like a 'everything happens for a reason' rationalization. Solar panels even more than everything else have just been about cost effectiveness over their life span.
> This seems like a 'everything happens for a reason' rationalization
I do believe in a rational universe but I think that's not your connotation here.
> When has ramping up an industry from expensive luxury to commodity ever stunted the progress?
Progress can be easily stunted by poor initial standards that get cemented into place. Solar panels are still a young technology and are still being proven out in a lot of ways. eg: bi-facial panels may be a game-changer in terms of how we think about mounting panels.
As another response at the same level as yours suggested, poor initial quality panels created a bad name for themselves where they live. In their region, getting panels is not seen as a wise move despite the technology moving on significantly from the initial mass-experience.
There are plenty of examples of superior technology being beaten out by popularity of an inferior technology. Even our current electric grids (which are at capacity and having trouble globally dealing with solar capacity) are an example of this. It seems as though you are willing to ignore those things given your selective hindsight and wish of even more pervasive solar photovoltaic technology.
You can't change the past, but you can learn from it to try and make better decisions for the future.
There are plenty of examples of superior technology being beaten out by popularity of an inferior technology.
This is not the same as a luxury being commoditization and has nothing to do with it. It is a diversion by pretending you said something different initially.
Even our current electric grids (which are at capacity and having trouble globally dealing with solar capacity)
Says who? Your evidence of nothing? For starters rooftop solar means less electricity going over the grid to a house as well as less electricity used for air conditioning due to shading the roof.
Worldwide solar is a small percentage of electricity, so who is "our" when you say "our electrical grids are at capacity" and why would electricity from solar have anything to do with it?
Here is some actual information since you don't have any:
What is false? Where is any evidence for anything you've said? All you've done is make claims and be patronizing but you never backed up a single thing you said in any post you made.
You may be putting the cart before the horse. Wouldnt pumping out tons of anything create forcing functions for efficiency, as in, exactly what happened but on a longer timeframe?
Building external combustion cars in the 1880s might have given Britain an economic edge over the US in the period, but the market would have still collapsed when internal combustion matured enough. And being a specialist in one technology usually means you're not able to move to a different one when it becomes obsolete.
Those are not the same kind of subsidy. there is quite a lot more ambiguity and uncertainty in the type of subsidy because it is claiming mispricing of externalities (i.e your usage caused x harm and you didnt pay for x harm) rather than the variety the renewables industry mostly gets which is a direct injection of cash through grants and various price supports.
Much of the forced and child labor used in solar panel production, mining, and transport, as with everything else in China's production systems, goes completely unacknowledged and unaccounted for in these navel gazing expeditions.
With all those corners cut to mass produce cheap materials like batteries and solar panels and computers and so forth, China is able to undercut production that utilizes ethical and sustainable production. I don't think you can look at China's production "costs" as legitimate data, and the problem doesn't seem to be one that anyone outside of China will ever fix. The extent of the influence the rest of the world has over the problem lies entirely in our ability to not do business with China.
When you look at all the savings you get when buying electronics and solar panels and infrastructure related products coming out of China, you're getting a human suffering discount. I don't think it's a good thing to include those numbers when considering long term things like fossil fuel dependencies and so forth - let's not bake in the human suffering discounts and at least try to price in human rights and humane labor practices.
It turns out a lot of things are way more expensive when factory workers and shippers and everyone in a supply chain get paid fair wages and work fair hours.
This isn't to say anything in favor of fossil fuels, I just think the immediate plight of China's factory workers might be an important factor relevant to the actual costs in play.
Do you know of any credible sources/references that have attempted to quantify that "human suffering discount?" I'm genuinely curious.
My impression is that China simply has the Solar industry established. It's a bit like semi-conductors in Taiwan, the knowledge, practice, and facilities are present. It takes a significant investment to build factories. To that extent, it also raises the question what percentage of solar panel costs is labor, vs capital investments, vs raw material.
I do not discount the statement/concern. At the same time, I don't think the other end of the spectrum is true where we could say "we could do it too if we also used child labor." I do think it's the case where Chinese manufacturing capacity of solar panels is simply superior compared to any other country. It's a massive capital investment and commitment to enable that much production capacity. At 80% the global production of all solar panels, China has an army of solar production factories.
From what I could find (none of which was satisfying conclusive), it looks like there is a very considerable raw material cost for solar panels, and the manufacturing process is also complicated. [1][2]
Yes, things would be more expensive if workers had more rights. I don’t see how that is an argument against or in favor of any particular energy source.
Further, if workers’ well-being are your main consideration (admirable), we should be moving away from coal as quickly as possible.
> if workers’ well-being are your main consideration (admirable), we should be moving away from coal as quickly as possible.
I'm pro renewables and I'm happy to see the back of coal . . .
however ...
Australia is the second biggest biggest exporter of coal, uses no child labour, is heavily mechanised with a small number of workers compared to tonnage moved, has excellent worker conditions in terms of safety, paid overtime, holidays, etc.
You point appears to be based in some Appalachian romance notion of tunneling out coal with pickaxes and coal carts pulled by children.
I find this an interesting statistics, in 2023 there were 36.5k total people employed in the US coal industry. [1] It's simply just not a lot of people in the grand scheme. That speaks to how industrialized coal production is in the US - it doesn't take that many people to do mountain top removal and drive heavy machinery.
FWIW & for comparison, Circuit city at its peak employed 40k people, that's more people than the US Coal industry employs today [2]
Proponents of renewables often cite the price and use it as an argument against nuclear energy. Nuclear energetics uses highly regulated local labor, giving it an inherent disadvantage against unregulated foreign labor. If renewables rely on underpaid or even child labor, it's not sustainable nor realistic, the numbers in that calculation have to be updated and the decisions reconsidered.
The entire U.S. tax code is one big Central Planning committee. Who should get subsidies? Who should get taxed? The capitalists who celebrated the luxury of American supermarkets over Soviet grocery stores failed to mention the significant farm subsidies given then (and still given).
There’s an old joke of a woman who agrees to sleep with a man for a million dollars but refuses for a dollar (“what kind of woman do you take me for?”), the punchline being that it’s no longer a question of principles but of price.
I guess the point here is that as soon as some amount of subsidies is acceptable, it’s no longer a showdown between unbridled capitalism and a command economy. The question really just becomes one of degree.
Climate change itself is an unintended consequence of pricing the well-being of the commons at zero.
There is a fair discussion regarding regulated vs free market to be had, but people at least need to understand market failures first (externalities being one of them).
Of course there is. The subsidy would be on watts output, not on number if panels. Therefore any way to make the panels cheaper to produce and/or more efficient brings more revenue and more profit margin.
There was something of a solar power winter in the late 70s/early 80s. Professors were often not getting tenure in that area. Research funding was thin. Etc.
As an intermediate step to electric, I don't know why we couldn't have gotten by with smaller, less powerful engines. Our huge vehicles are so wasteful. Simply putting vehicles (across the board) on a massive diet in a short span of time would have made a huge reduction in fossil fuel use for transportation.
>I don't know why we couldn't have gotten by with smaller, less powerful engines.
CAFE standards made cheap light trucks illegal; to a point, they also make cheap small cars illegal (ignoring the absurd collision standards- 2005 cars and 2020 cars are not meaningfully different; but in 2005 the average car on the road was still under 3000 pounds).
As always, power without accountability. No bureaucrat or lawmaker is getting fined or voted out for these stupid standards that have done untold economic damage, and this crap will continue until they are.
Speaking based on a part of south India, almost ever medium to large size house had a solar panel in the 90s. They were however horrible and could barely power a few lights so fell out of favor and never used. I think if we had current 250W panels up, people there would think differently about them.
I would put it as follows: in the last 30 years there have been real advances in practical nanotechnology.
Not Drexlerian nanomachine fantasies, but nanometre scale control of the surface geometry of materials. Controlling surface geometries at these small scales is what has powered the advance of solar PV since 1990.
This would not have been possible without the continually increasing computer simulation power that has been available since the 1990s.
>>Solar panels have seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades.
Yes. And the reason that innovation happened is because of the combination of people seeing the importance and potential profits, policy drivers, and funding and interest (it became cool, not just niche) in the field of solar.
When people see that there is money and fame to be made, they get motivated, reallocate resources, which attracts researchers, which make discoveries, which generates an accelerating pace of discovery as more new available knowledge forms the base of exponentially more new connections/discoveries.
It is a feed-forward system, and all it takes is a close-to-ready field of study and the pump being primed. This could definitely have happened earlier.
