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consider the implications for a post scarcity future
(slrpnk.net)
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8471507
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this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2024
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Don't forget, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was just in China to protect US interests - this time because China has flooded the market with cheap solar panels.
We can't have solar power becoming affordable and accessible for most people.
I’ve said it a million times, we had the opportunity to get into the market early under Bush JR, but he shot down investing in the tech. Now who is one of the top exporters?
The manufacturing would still have probably been moved to China at this point, but it's frustrating that we didn't even try to support it.
100% true
It's more complicated than that. Supply shocks cause short term instability in markets that require long term revenue streams to offer service.
Because we privatized our infrastructure, and because private firms divert a bunch of their revenue to profit, we have a bunch of material infrastructure that needs to be maintained by firms more interested in extracting profit than keeping them functional.
That's the real threat of solar panels. If we cut into private profit margins, they'll allow the infrastructure to collapse rather than maintain them with declining profit.
Seems like the real problem is corporations and the solution would be to violently nationalize at the slightest hint of bad faith.
I don't think it's a good idea to have our infrastructure be used as a hostage.
That's a smart policy, from the economics perspective. But its pretty disastrous from the politics perspective.
Countries that try to nationalize their major productive assets regularly find themselves destabilized and regime changed in short order.
All I keep reading is the failure of capitalism at the end of the day.
Its failure of regulation. Same shit will happen in any system if its not properly regulated and checked...
It's nuanced. Domestic solar panel production is lagging and cheaper shit from China is gonna make it worse. It is not necessarily evil to want to have local production, and if we live under capitalism then it has to make money.
I agree though that for the most part even our good politicians do whatever they can to maintain the status quo, and that is generally bad for us and good for corporations and the billionaires
Isn't this the point of the free market? Shouldn't capitalists rejoice when things are working as intended?
Only when they own the means of production.
If they can't extract profit from Chinese imports, they don't want anyone else to import them.
Yes but we don't have a free market.
States don't serve the majority, per se, but whoever wields the state. Cheap imports are good for consumers, but producers struggle. Capitalists wield the state in America, so this is a bad thing.
I don't see the problem. Buy the underpriced Chinese Solar. If they raise prices, build a factory. It's only a few years of overpriced panels, then prices go back down. If they are dumping panels, it's the Chinese who are handing free money to US consumers.
After the US is 100% solar we can worry about domestic manufacturing for maintaining infrastructure.
except the U.S. needs solar panels for military industrial complex reasons too, and they don't want to rely on a notoriously hostile power to build the groundwork of that structure. a big part of selling the U.S. on solar is the promise of energy independence, you don't get independence if your entire foundation is built on another country's tech.
The US exports oil and gas so we are already energy independent. If China sold Gold to US consumers at $1000 an ounce, should the US step in and stop China from giving Americans cheap gold?
Yes I understand the need for domestic production. Factories take a few years to ramp up. Domestic production can be started after everyone has solar panels and old panels need replacement.
The USA keeps several wartime industries afloat with subsidies in case of war. The big one is steel, but there are others as well.
There has been a recent rethink of what industries are needed during war and solar capacity is part of that.
If it was that important then the US should've invested in local manufacturing.
Solar panels degrade over time, I don't know what the numbers are but they used to be dysmal, like 30% reduction in generation capacity over 5 years. Whatever the actual numbers are, we will constantly be replacing panels. I am sure we can figure out refurbishing too at some point.
Yeah they're definitely better now, I'm reading anywhere between 1% per year or 12.5% at year 25. There are other things that can pop up though, micro cracks causing localized overheating of the panel - to backing failures and other physical issues. I'm interested in standing some up at some point but the capital eludes me at the moment.
I'm am certainly wrong, that figure was something my dad told me as a kid, we were on solar back then.
No worries at all. Like you said though, with advancements people will likely do upgrades over time anyways. I don't have numbers off the top of my head, but even just the per panel efficiencies have grown fantastically since your last experience.
Yeah I was totally wrong, that is great though!
??? Monocrystalline silicon losses less than .4% a year. That means after 50 years it's still producing 82% of when it was new. It takes 90 years to get a 30% reduction rate.
https://www.engineering.com/story/what-is-the-lifespan-of-a-solar-panel
Do you know the type of pv panel that was used 20+ years ago? I lived in an off grid house and my dad mentioned that at one point.
Monocrystalline silicon was used 20 years ago. It's the oldest solar technology.
According to the source data in a link in the page I linked thin film CIGS rollable solar sheets was the least durable. Panels installed before 2000 had a degradation of 3.5% a year. That's 10 years to lose 30%. But CIGS solar systems installed after the year 2000 show only .02% degradation a year. The document talks about manufacturing defects that were corrected.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
Ok, I'm just flat wrong! Til!
Yeah but your point is that solar panels degrade 30% after 5 years, and then you reframe the context for 20 years ago?
Go astrosurf somewhere else.
Any grid has a maintenance cost and degradation. Solar panels isn't any different.
The fuck are you talking about. I was wrong. Get over it.
That doesn't sound nuanced. That sounds like the free market, so capitalism, did its thing and the US doesn't like the outcome. It's almost like capitalism is a terrible system that the US's lead economist is trying to subvert.
Agree, but we aren't in a free market. That is a fantasy the conservatives have been pushing forever to get away from regulation.
Correct.
Id say the bulk of jobs being created in north america wont be in manufacturing the panels, but rather in the installation and upkeep of solar farms and solar panels on houses. If thats the case, then we want the panels themselves to be as low cost as possible to keep the overall cost of projects down.
If politicians had any balls at all (they dont) they'd be proposing publicly funded solar farms outside every major city. But we cant have that because that would be the government directly competing with oil companies, and thats why oil companies have bought one side of our entire political system to keep that from ever happening.
But then you have the issue of being dependent on China for the solar panels, which is why it is crucial to have domestic production. And we have already seen this demonstrated, as China has banned the export of solar panels recently in reaction to us banning electric cars from import (they would probably hurt our domestic car market).
Which is an entirely different story that I don’t get. Sure, the protectionism, ok, but there’s no one even attempting to compete with them, and legacy manufacturers have backtracked even more in introducing any. Even Tesla appears to have given up on a reasonably priced EV. What’s the point of protectionism if there’s no equivalent market to protect and no one wants to establish one?
Do subsidies not exist in your reality? Or are they only reserved for corn farmers?
They do, but I was responding to someone that said Yellen went to China to address it, so they aren't immediately starting with subsidizing production.