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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Panels are a commodity at this point. I hate to say it but mineral extraction, processing and panel manufacturing will be way more expensive than importing from China.

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

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Relying on China as a trade partner, who has been hostile to the US in every way except kinetic, is a hidden cost of those "cheap" panels. Is China's an economy whose growth you want to willingly contribute to? That is sort of like not reading the geopolitical room.

while the geopolitical take is true, the economic sacrifice you'd have by not taking china's surplus is actually not benefitial.

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.

A counterpoint: Qcells has been expanding their Georgia (U.S.) solar factories. 8.4GW capacity by the end of the year (which is the equivalent of like... 15 typical centralized power plants). Labor costs are lower in the south. But, overall, I agree with you.

most of the onshoring is not dictated by cost but the realization that something that looks like COVID lockdowns of Chinese factories and ports makes just-in-time untenable.

Most likely, you will see a lot of made in Mexico/Caribbean/Canada

Aka “friend-shoring”. Honestly I struggle to see why we can’t start bootstrapping some tech build here in the US.

You might want to check how much of the stuff made in Mexico uses components and materials from China

Is that really cheaper though taking into account that the cheap ones (and perhaps the expensive ones too) have a lifetime of about 50 years and cannot be recycled at all?

That doesn't sound sustainable at all to me.

Recycling is not a magic word for "cheap". Landfilling a bunch of panels every 50 years is fine: they're "just" sintered sand.

Yes because land is free, according to solar power proponents

Cheap in equatorial areas suitable for massive solar farms with expected daytime tempretures of 40-50 C, yes.

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.

The amount of material in solar panels is tiny compared to our other landfill-destined refuse streams, and it needs to be compared to the analogous waste streams from other forms of energy generation. Nuclear creates long term storage needs. Coal creates tailings. Fracking pollutes groundwater.

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-...

Calling solar panels sintered sand is an over simplification. Aside from the amount of energy and water it takes to produce them, a lot of older panels have some pretty toxic materials that can leech out... lead, cadmium etc.

We will need to process these appropriately at their end of life and not just landfill them.

The material came from the ground, and the landfill puts them back in the ground.

Sounds pretty circular and sustainable to me.

That's my point: we really don't need to recycle solar panels. We could land fill them for the next 500 years and they'll be the least of our problems, even accounting for heavy metals.

The quip about "cheap" was that recyclability has nothing to do with it (it would likely add cost, not remove any).

They can be recycled; currently at a cost of about $18/panel, which isn't great (landfilling is cheaper), but there's reason to think that cost can drop some as they improve the process.

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.

>Frankly im not even sure the labor cost is even solvable. Will probably always have to utilize low foreign wages

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)

https://youtu.be/CRkfqH1r714?si=8FsPUVBnizwkixvB

How is that “creepy”?

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.

>How is that “creepy”?

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.

> Will probably always have to utilize low foreign wages

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.

It's hard to know what you're saying. Everything should be examined carefully (although you can't examine something "with nuance" - nuance is not an examination tool). What are you actually saying? If $1 buys a good meal somewhere, but it costs $15 for the same meal somewhere else, paying someone less in the former location is not a moral failing.

A meal might be 15x cheaper, but a phone, laptop, car or anything imported will surely not be cheaper.

> A meal might be 15x cheaper, but a phone, laptop, car or anything imported will surely not be cheaper.

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.

> anything imported will surely not be cheaper

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.

There are $50 android phones to a top of the line $1,500 iPhone. These are only sold in developing markets and are unsurprisingly, not very good. but they're better than nothing. cars also have this thing where they're cheaper outside of the US due to lax safety regulations.

its the tariffs, anything not built in the US is insanely hard/impossible to import so they cost a bunch more, but you have a local auto industry. in aus, for example, we flat out don't have such an industry anymore (still mad about holden) and that was in part due to imported vehicles being cheaper

As a consumer, of course you buy what's cheaper and that's not a moral failing.

Policy makers on the other hand should consider externalities, and optimize for making them less bad, or at least not make them worse.

I'd go further and say that policy makers currently actively manipulate the population by manufacturing consent for an unsustainable lifestyle built upon the back of cheap foreign labor.

I think you’re missing the price competitive constraint. I said it would need low foreign wages to be price competitive with China. Under what non-neoliberal mindset is this false? I can only think of one and I dont think its what you have in mind: reduce labor rights and eliminate the minimum wage.

I hear you, I just think it merits a discussion on how to bolster our national energy grid without necessitating the ongoing disenfranchisement of cheap foreign labor markets, the majority of which were created intentionally by Western society over the last two centuries.

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...

If you examined your thoughts more closely, you'd realize they're ridiculous.

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.

The mentality that low foreign wages are necessary to sustain a certain quality of life is by definition classism, we just don't notice how unfair it is because we outsource what cheap labor we can, and do a great job of segregating the remaining cheap domestic labor class from the middle and upper classes.

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.

And in a global economy, that is much easier to do because there is no common power to enforce otherwise.

Though, notably, the experience between someone in Mississippi and New York City is already wildly different.

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