Yeah, for all the worry about (digital) semiconductors, the US’s solar cell capacity has atrophied. There are a few large thin film fabs, like First Solar, but NO operational large silicon cell fabs now that Panasonic has pulled out of the Tesla Buffalo factory (I hope Tesla replaces them) as part of their global reorienting away from cell manufacture. Violet Power is hoping to change that, but it’s remarkable how much the US relies on imported solar cells, with almost no domestic capacity.
Makes sense as the cells are a commodity and extremely cheap (7¢/Watt...). They’re a minority of solar panel costs (15-30¢/Watt) which are themselves a minority of installed solar costs (70-100¢/Watt utility, above $2/Watt residential), but it leaves the US heavily reliant on imports for the Green New Deal or related initiatives.
Violet power is interesting as they’re setup across the street from a shuttered polysilicon plant in Washington state IIRC. They’re planning to be vertically integrated in panel manufacture (& eventually use that silicon plant) for cells with extremely high efficiency (20 and eventually 30%) cells with a 50 year warranty lifetime (double the normal 25). It’s a good approach for a US company, IMHO. They want to eventually get to 5GW/year output capacity. Which sounds like a lot but is minuscule compared to what we need.
To transition to electrified everything, the US needs 1TW average electricity. We currently produce ~500GW average, 300GW of which comes from fossil fuels. Nameplate solar capacity is only about 10-20% of average electricity output (depending on lots of factors including seasonal effects), so to replace the 300GW average of fossil fuel electricity, we’d need 1500-3000GW of solar nameplate. To electrify everything, we’d need an additional 500GW average, for a total of 4-8 Terawatts of additional nameplate solar.
To do that over 20 years would require 200-400GW per year of solar cell and panel capacity output. And this is just the existing US demand. We need to be investing a ridiculous amount in solar factory capacity RIGHT NOW if we’re serious about climate action.
(Luckily solar panel factories only cost about 20¢/(Watt/year) in capital cost even in the US... maybe about the same for combined cell/wafer/silicon capacity for a total of 50¢/(W/year), so 200GW/yr vertically integrated factory capacity may only cost $100 billion to build out which is not that much when you think about it... Except we aren’t doing it.)