Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China | Hacker News Reader

Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China

nytimes.com

20 pointsyanw27 comments

This brings up some really weird reader that screws up the layout in Chrome. Here's a standard one page link instead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environmen...

Thanks for this link, I would have otherwise skipped this article for now. I received a warning that nyt was trying to store data on my system "for offline use."

The link above is to a page intended for the NYT's Google Chrome App. It does indeed cache articles and the like in your browser as per the HTML5 spec, so that if you were to lose your connectivity (say on a mobile device) you could continue to browse and review stuff the app has cached.

I happen to think that this layout is considerably less annoying than the NYT's main site.

Thanks. After finishing the article, I found the definition of that request: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Offline_resources_in_Firefo....

I am guessing I had pre-primed myself for paranoid thinking after previously reading another HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106677.

So we're loaning the finance industry trillion dollars at essentially zero interest rate just so they can lend it back to federal government by buying treasuries and pocket the difference (and thus "recover from the crisis"), while China lends tens of billions dollars more than US does to solar energy companies. I hope I'm not the only one who finds the implications scary.

This is exactly what is going to happen with the lithium battery technologies being developed for hybrids - lots of federal money being poured into research with no restrictions on where they are going to be made.

LiFePo4 battery technology was invented in the USA but now is mostly made in China.

Why do we protect corn with massive subsidies and massive import tariffs (creating horror shows of destructive ethanol, food products and animal feed) but not our technology and jobs?

You want all the (potential) pollution?

Citation? This seems to be a reflexive "counterpoint" to anybody who says that manufacturing can be done in the US.

I live near a car plant and have lived near a small semiconductor fab (in the US) and I can tell you that I've never seen any smoke or smelled anything. I've also lived in India and even small-scale industries used to emit smoke and smells (indicating chemicals).

The point being that China and India choose to pollute (to save costs), not that the technology to manufacture with low impact doesn't exist.

In almost any major US city, if you go a couple of miles perpendicular to most major roads, you will likely see some light industrial activity. It's usually so quiet and non-polluting that you don't even realize it's there. At least, that's been my experience. YMMV.

That's exactly my point. You don't want pollution. Factories in the U.S. need to take care of that. And it costs money.

Moving to less regulated places like China and India saves that cost.

Ok. Your original post sounded as if you thought the technology to do things with low impact didn't exist (i.e., pollution was inevitable).

On a different note: So you're OK with pollution in China? You do realize that China and the US are on the same planet, right?

Airborne pollution from China is exacerbating fog in LA [1]. A beneficial example is that sands of the Sahara are a major source of fertilization in the Amazon [2].

[1] http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=392&catid=10...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_storm

No, I'm not OK with pollution in China at all. I'm from China!

And having lived in Germany for a while, I do believe there are clean technologies. The place where I used to live is close to a coal-burning power station. I can see the white smoke from its chimney everyday, but the quality of air in that area is insanely great (compared to what I used to have in China).

I'm not sure how much more clean technologies cost there, yet somehow Germans found a way to keep their industry within its border. I hope U.S. firms could learn something there. However I'm not so optimistic given the vast financial benefits of moving dirty industries to other continents and relatively small number of people like you guys here that worry about such things. Most people probably won't give a damn.

> No, I'm not OK with pollution in China at all. I'm from China!

Whoa! :) Thanks for your responses.

I upvoted because I hadn't seen this layout for the NYT website before. It's kind of neat, especially when you click the X button the top right. Very cleanly laid out.

6.8 megabytes of downloaded data to read a single article.

That is my entire daily bandwidth budget on my wireless plan.

This is how their iPad app looks.

It was completely unreadable for me, on firefox, ubuntu lynx. Fortunately, readability cleaned it up.

This is their Chrome webapp.

http://i.imgur.com/BAefW.png

Very clean :)

(Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows 7)

Completely fubar on my Nexus One - hangs for a half minute on load, then all I see is the categories/account/etc panel.

It appears from the outset that Evergreen was operating in bad faith in accepting government stimulus, but they did have their back against the wall.

China has dirt cheap labor, no pollution regulations and strong government support -- how can any US manufacturing survive against that?

According the article, and assuming Evergreen and China are honest about environmental regulations, the labor prices are not the real issue here. It's grants and loans made by the Chinese banks and local governments that are making up the bulk of the savings.

Still, $300 per month per employee in China vs $5400 in Massachusetts is going to turn some attention to China regardless of other costs.

Would be interesting to know how polluting these factories are. I visited a solar panel factory in China and it was pretty much as described here: clean, white rooms, automated machines, protective clothing for staff. Didn't look like there was much sign of pollution.

The other question is the long term effect of this export of work to China. Can they really make a profit at this rate, or are they hoping that by selling below cost and concentrating manufacturing within China they will eventually be able to invest in research at a better return and one day start extracting economic rents on their monopoly in manufacturing knowledge.

well, the other thing to consider is whether China is basically trying to do what Walmart did to it's competitors.

If you can undercut competition to the point where your competitors drop out, then you have free reign to do whatever you wish in the market, since you have a monopoly.

This depends on how quickly you can ramp up capacity if China starts to increase prices or decrease supply. My guess with developed countries is that the answer to that is "not quickly", as we tend to be more fastidious about bureaucracy. The rate of ramping back up capacity decreases even quicker once China starts to get an R&D advantage from economies of scale and years of research into improving their processes. Compare the hoo hah over rare earth metals.

Who's responsible for long-term planning of renewables in the US? The first result in DDG for "US renewable energy plan" is "US renewable energy plan 'shortsighted'":

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/...

This is the truly frustrating part of the article. It's so disheartening to hear that in spite of bailouts that we've made to the major financial institutions in the US, they won't lend to restart the economy and keep people employed.

This is local for me. We're losing 800 jobs.

On the bright side, the supposed force driving the move (plunging prices for solar panels) is a good thing.

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