And, if they have enough autonomy to import Chinese panels (50% cheaper), a network of these nations can blanket the entire country with renewables.
Funding and consultation started in 2004. Expected completion date 2029. Quarter of a century to build 8km of road.
So the easiest answer is: "yes"/"all of the above"
Even as energy production prices from solar trend towards zero, end user energy costs is still going to be lower bounded by transmission costs.
California in particular is getting a nasty taste of this, with many customer's bill being mostly transmission costs. However, this is largely because they're paying for PG&E's lawsuit payouts and regulatory required upgrades.
Energy can be free, but reliable and safe transmission will likely always be expensive.
Prerequisites for manufacturing panels here at an even remotely competitive price includes reducing labor costs and extracting/refining minerals at scale.
I absolutely agree we should onshore solar production but simply onshoring manufacturing isnt the first step. Frankly im not even sure the labor cost is even solvable. Will probably always have to utilize low foreign wages
The solar panels can enable other industries locally. For example, cheap and plentiful electricity can be used to produce local stuff that costs energy.
And solar panel production is not really "strategically" important - in a kinetic war, china can withold solar panels and it would not make a difference in the war.
Therefore, there's no reason not to import cheap panels.
Most likely, you will see a lot of made in Mexico/Caribbean/Canada
That doesn't sound sustainable at all to me.
https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/solarcycle-to-bui...
The nice thing about them is that they're pretty simple compared to a lot of modern electronics. More hope about recycling them than piles of old computers.
We will need to process these appropriately at their end of life and not just landfill them.
Sounds pretty circular and sustainable to me.
The quip about "cheap" was that recyclability has nothing to do with it (it would likely add cost, not remove any).
The US installed about 32 GW of solar in 2023. (1)
A modern 395W bifacial solar module (2) weighs 25.7kg; about 65g per watt.
That's about two million metric tons of solar panels to handle every year. In contrast, the US produces about 73 million metric tons of plastic waste per year. We landfill a total of about 131 million metric tons per year (3) -- and that's ignoring that things like coal tailings aren't accounted for in landfilling amounts. We produce and burn about 534 million metric tons of coal per year.
The numbers are large but the relative cost of solar panels 50 years hence is likely extremely tolerable compared to the alternatives.
(1) https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-2023-expected-...
(2) https://signaturesolar.com/hyundai-395w-bifacial-solar-panel...
(3) https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
Free, not exactly, but certainly affordable.
https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/04/08/andrew-forr...
For scale reference those solar farms | cattle stations are to provide power to mining operations that ship almost a billion tonnes of iron ore per annum (and remove a factor of overburden) consuming major amounts of fossil fuel in the process.
Work is also underway to upgrade trains that roll that billion tonnes to the coast down a 600m height differential to recoup energy.
See: Infinity train.
You appear to be carrying some beef about "solar power proponents" being unrealistic hippy socialists rather than multi billion dollar industrialists.
An entitled and creepy af attitude, if there ever was one.
"Foreign" "wages" are not going to stay low forever.
Already gone up and going up in some countries.
Think (and act) smarter, dude.
Only the fittest of the fittest shall survive.
- Bob Marley (Could you be loved)
Regardless, we’re already seeing the effects as manufacturing moves away from China and towards India.
Now, what happens to those increased wages when the demand for workers is gone?
That’s right. They collapse.
I don't know. I just felt it was like that, so said it. Can't really explain it. Gut feel.
>Now, what happens to those increased wages when the demand for workers is gone?
>That’s right. They collapse.
Yeah. It happens. All the time. Deal with it.
Cycles, dude, cycles.
Business cycles. Ups and downs.
Power cycles (between various power groups). Ditto.
You know, like our old pals, Xerxes, Darius, Cambyses, Alexander, Attila, Caesar, Ashoka, Chandragupta Maurya, Genghis Khan, Akbar, Timur, Napoleon, Hitler, Cortes, and many more (in no particular order).
Horse-drawn carts. Cars. ICE cars. EVs. Age of sail. Steam ships. Abacus. PCs. Mobiles.
You get the drift. It's called progress. Not so sure. But it is what it is.
This mindset lies at the center of neoliberalism and should be examined with nuance and perspective, since the quality of each individual's experience can vary wildly in a market which accepts such inequalities as necessary for the health of the overall system.
Policy makers on the other hand should consider externalities, and optimize for making them less bad, or at least not make them worse.
Im not sure I understand what you’re saying because it absolutely is orders of magnitude to import phones and laptops. Cars have more tariffs to protect the domestic market so Im unsure about that one.
Possibly not, but that can't be solved purely by employers. If a country for whatever reason does not have the economy to support this, this can't be solved quickly. Companies won't pay $15/hr to overseas workers; they'd probably just not spend the money there at all. That's the choice you're giving them.
Also - it probably will be cheaper, for three reasons:
- the local market won't bear the real price, and while this means less profit, it's still some profit, or presence, or whatever reason the vendor is selling for
- a similar but slightly different product might be offered. E.g. I bought a car in South Africa and it was a slightly simpler spec compared to the UK equivalent, despite looking identical
- local labour, fuel tax, sales tax, and other costs all increase prices. Driving the goods to a shop and buying them from it is a pretty different cost in different countries.
Should we pay everyone the same in a given country? Should a food deliverer make the same as a surgeon? No? Then this creates an economic hierarchy already. This economic hierarchy exists for countries as well.
It's not ridiculous to examine this. Your example compares the relative value of different professions, which is not relevant, because the context of this discussion is the comparison of domestic and foreign labor for the same professions.
Pragmatically speaking, there will always be an economic gradient under a capitalist system, as this gradient is necessary for the system to work. But we should still be mindful of the impact of our decisions at every level of the system.
Parent poster was suggesting that a cheap foreign labor market is required in order to create a better national energy grid. Economic policies which rely upon this sort of thinking inevitably establish structural classism. There is no moral excuse for structural classism, which is quite a different discussion than your comparison of food delivery and surgery as two services with a different inherent value.
Though, notably, the experience between someone in Mississippi and New York City is already wildly different.
I'm not comparing solar industry labor with cobalt mining, but I think cobalt mining is a good modern example of a more extreme version of this. Absolutely deplorable working conditions in order to enable a higher quality life for more "civilized" countries. The kind of classist thinking which has existed for such a long period of time that it's often taken for granted as some sort of necessary evil of society.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11668015/Devastatin...