Are locally produced solar modules the future?

>I’m really starting to wonder about the collective value of skilled factory jobs and how that isn’t factored in to value calculations in typical USA business logic.

Because typical businesses are making decisions for themselves, and not their whole industry or economy?

Colluding with other businesses to try to achieve a collective goal might well even be illegal.

I agree with you — and there must be a name for this kind of thinking. I was going to jokingly call you a "red" but, kidding aside, it's not even close to Communism. You're suggesting something more akin to forward-looking Capitalism.

You're talking about what promotes the welfare of society, fundamentally a normative question hinging on our conception of "welfare", while I was talking about what the patterns of world trade are and will be in the future, and what causes affect them, a factual question. I did not intend to deprecate the importance of skilled factory jobs to the welfare of society. In fact, my comment didn't touch on normative questions at all.

I think that, in order to formulate a strategy to promote some set of objectives, as you are trying to do, you must first have a correct factual understanding of the causal relations of cause and effect that relate to those objectives. Whatever strategy you formulate will only have a tendency to promote your objectives, whatever they are, to the extent that your factual understanding of the causal structure of the system you are trying to affect is correct. Therefore, factual analysis of the relevant causal structure is epistemologically prior to any such normative analysis of strategies.

If your factual understanding is sufficiently incorrect, as in Tales of the Black Freighter, the strategy you formulate can easily have the opposite effect of what you intend. This is especially likely if your factual beliefs are being manipulated by other players whose objectives do not align with your own; this article seems to be an attempt at such manipulation.

It is possible to compete with China on things that require special knowledge and are rarely needed. "Special knowledge" because China doesn't have the local skills to produce it (yet). "Rarely needed" because China didn't prioritize acquiring said knowledge. Case in point: Germany mostly exports production machinery (rarely needed, last forever, very special knowledge) and luxury automobiles (rarely needed, last quite some time, some special knowledge needed (mostly on how to appear "luxury")).

But in general, I firmly believe that western nations with high social, environmental, legal standards cannot compete with China, except in areas where China didn't yet have the chance to catch up for some reason. I think we are going back to a world where most nations know how to produce almost everything, so competition will no longer be on that knowledge but more on the other necessary factors to make production cheaper.

There are many things that Germany and the USA can do more cheaply than China, and those are the things they currently export to China. This can happen because of local skills and knowledge, for example, or because of natural resources such as brines and geothermal energy that are uneconomic to ship overseas for processing, or because of existing capital investments like those in the Richardson Grating Lab in Rochester, New York, or because of favorable regulatory environments like California's prohibition on contractual employer ownership of the work products of employees outside work hours.

There's the Ricardian comparative advantage argument: even if, say, China can produce N95 masks more efficiently than the US, the US might still be able to export N95 masks to China, if all the Chinese are so busy producing more profitable products like solar panels and microchips that they don't have time to also produce N95 masks, as manifested by Chinese wages rising too high for N95-mask factories to produce N95 masks at competitive prices.

However, this does not seem to be the case at present. If anything, the situation is reversed: there are things Germany imports from China, even though Germany could make them domestically from less inputs, because German wages are higher than Chinese wages.

The Germans save a lot and they refuse to increase public debt which means some other government has to take on that debt. Germany's ability to export its products is actually just its ability to export debts which is only a matter of how far you are willing to go vs your competitors. If everyone followed this strategy there would be no world economy.

Undoubtedly the factory was paying a PR firm, not the newspaper!

What part of China do you live in where the production sites are somewhere other than in the middle of a major city?

One significant difference between environmental regulatory regimes in Germany and China is that in Germany there is no death penalty for polluters.

Regardless, my comment wasn't about what would be good or bad or what was worth paying or whether the environmental costs of Chinese PV manufacturing are 9% higher than those of Europe or 13% higher or 90% lower, and according to what measures (information you somehow seem to have forgotten to include in your comment too). It was about what economic circumstances must obtain for local production of PV modules to be economically competitive with modules shipped in from overseas, whether the modules are shipped from Germany, from China, or from Indonesia.

From clicking around a little, it seems they were bought by elecnor, who seem to, among other things, use the solar panels to build power plants. So they found a buyer who just bought its own manufacturer, selling the excess on the side. Nonetheless, half the models they are offering seem to be made in China.

Yes, mostly you are right, nowadays. Problem is, imho, only in 2007 or 2008 China surpassed Germany in production (I can't find a source atm, just from memory). That would have been the right time for the EU involvement, but they took 5 more years where German manufacturers were hung out to dry.

We are in Seattle and are already breaking even.

We used Blossom Solar which was affordable and did a great job.

We got a loan at a very low interest rate and the payment is about the same as our power bill was. It helps that Seattle has net metering, so we didn’t need to build a battery wall and can offset our winter energy use by generating it in summer.

Our electric rates go up faster than inflation, and so in a year or two our costs will be lower than they would have been without solar, and will remain so for at least a few decades.

You can’t continue to use unsustainable farming practices. The local future of farming will be combinations of permaculture food forests in public spaces, rooftop gardens, vertical high efficiency (closed system) farms, etc.

Those centralization examples are slowly breaking down right now, and the independent, community systems are (re)gaining popularity.

So any place that does pretty much anything with aluminum should already be fairly well set up then? Especially if they already had some sand pits that used to make auto glass but have sat idle the last 50 years...

Describing my rural area of West TN. Dunno much about making solar cells, but now im wanting to learn more.

Forget it. I only want artisanal electrons.

"No two the same color" was a problem in the early days of solar. That meant the coating process wasn't being controlled properly. About two decades ago I went to a talk by the head of Applied Materials solar where he mentioned that. They built IC fab equipment, where poor coating control is total batch fail.

>there's no reason for such excessive energy waste from transportation

Shipping by air, land, or sea, has radically different costs. Since time immemorial transport by water has been tremendously less expensive than the alternative.

I was curious, so I looked up some figures, which probably aren't very precise, but shipping a ton of stuff from Shanghai to Los Angeles (if you can put 29 tons in a 40-foot container) costs on the order of $500. By air, maybe $20,000.

People say shipping things around the world is wasteful, but 25 cents is completely different from 10 dollars a pound. Going inland can easily exceed the cost of a leisurely trip across an ocean.

Not to take away from the Asian countries, but this is a story about Germans putting together their own panels. It’s cool to see some variety springing up. One can support their own manufacturing tech and save on transportation.

Considering that the pandemic has effectively broken overseas supply chains, this would be the perfect time to switch to domestic production. It would help the job markets too.

Can you explain what you mean? As I understand it, BTC is tied solely to USD for exchange.