Everyone is buying from China. Nobody has the resources and cheap enough labour and fiscal policies that control labour wages and export costs to keep the panels as cheap as what China can make. It’s their century now.
Thing is, does it matter? Once they’re made they’ll be used for the next 20 years, it’s not like the stock needs constant replenishment because it can be used precisely once like LNG.
China has been selling solar panels at a loss because they wanted to scale their industry. They actually sell them below cost and subsidize the production.
The second big reason that they are cheaper is that they use coal and pollute more in the manufacturing process. If they produced panels with as little pollution as a western manufacturing company, the cost would be 10X higher.
In these huge solar panel plants, less than 1% of the current power inputs into the process is rewable, and there are no plans to make it renewable for at least the next 40 years… As in, all these long range power infrastructure investments in China are in coal and fossil fuels for this manufacturing sector.
China is worried about global warming. They realised there was only so much they could do themselves. They also realised the rest of the world is just going to bury its heads in the sand.
How can China combat global warming most efficiently? By dumping huge numbers of solar panels (and support equipment) onto the market at cost or below cost.
They don’t need to persuade foreign politicians, they just need to let the people under them attack the problem.
It’s simultaneously a very capitalistic, and communistic solution. Which seems to fit China’s mentality.
There are some headlines about how China was expecting constant growth of solar panel sales, and they went all out trying to build this future capacity so that they would be able to corner the market…
But they overestimated the speed of the sales growth and built way more manufacturing capacity than the amount the world wants to buy, meaning the whole system is wildly beyond the needed capacity.
This comes down to China not having enough oil, and thus not enough energy. Their domestic oil is only a drop in the buckef of what they need. So they go ham on everything else, demand side and supply side. To lower demand they build subways and trains like crazy. To increase energy supply they build hydro, nuclear, and now solar. Solar is now cheap because they had to focus on it.
They also seemed to realise they can make far more panels than they can deploy. It doesn’t matter where the oil is displaced, so long as it goes down, so will prices.
It’s now a profitable export that the world really needs. But there’s no grand plan, it’s just that China needed a way out of their own energy constraint.
Everyone is buying from China. Nobody has the resources and cheap enough labour and fiscal policies that control labour wages and export costs to keep the panels as cheap as what China can make. It’s their century now.
Thing is, does it matter? Once they’re made they’ll be used for the next 20 years, it’s not like the stock needs constant replenishment because it can be used precisely once like LNG.
China has been selling solar panels at a loss because they wanted to scale their industry. They actually sell them below cost and subsidize the production.
The second big reason that they are cheaper is that they use coal and pollute more in the manufacturing process. If they produced panels with as little pollution as a western manufacturing company, the cost would be 10X higher.
In these huge solar panel plants, less than 1% of the current power inputs into the process is rewable, and there are no plans to make it renewable for at least the next 40 years… As in, all these long range power infrastructure investments in China are in coal and fossil fuels for this manufacturing sector.
I’ve got a pet conspiracy theory.
China is worried about global warming. They realised there was only so much they could do themselves. They also realised the rest of the world is just going to bury its heads in the sand.
How can China combat global warming most efficiently? By dumping huge numbers of solar panels (and support equipment) onto the market at cost or below cost.
They don’t need to persuade foreign politicians, they just need to let the people under them attack the problem.
It’s simultaneously a very capitalistic, and communistic solution. Which seems to fit China’s mentality.
There are some headlines about how China was expecting constant growth of solar panel sales, and they went all out trying to build this future capacity so that they would be able to corner the market…
But they overestimated the speed of the sales growth and built way more manufacturing capacity than the amount the world wants to buy, meaning the whole system is wildly beyond the needed capacity.
This comes down to China not having enough oil, and thus not enough energy. Their domestic oil is only a drop in the buckef of what they need. So they go ham on everything else, demand side and supply side. To lower demand they build subways and trains like crazy. To increase energy supply they build hydro, nuclear, and now solar. Solar is now cheap because they had to focus on it.
Fully agreed.
They also seemed to realise they can make far more panels than they can deploy. It doesn’t matter where the oil is displaced, so long as it goes down, so will prices.
It’s now a profitable export that the world really needs. But there’s no grand plan, it’s just that China needed a way out of their own energy constraint.
While China is cheap that doesn’t preclude other countries from doing things.