Robot-Installed Solar Panels Cut Costs by 50% | Hacker News Reader

Robot-Installed Solar Panels Cut Costs by 50%

spectrum.ieee.org

26 pointsph0rque13 comments

Right. The Germans and Japanese are trenching new territory applying innovating construction technologies. Here in the US we will fail to even attempt to launch anything even remotely close to this because unions will raise hell and they'll get politicians to protect their ridiculously expensive jobs. Of course, private industry unions will be joined by government worker unions who will vie for their portion of the "screw the American people" fund and the rest will be history. Just ask Boeing how painful it is to actually clash with these forces. I was secretly hoping that they'd say "fuck it, we are moving all of our operations to Canada" or some such thing. Only something of that scale will finally send the message to washington and our voters that unions need to go the way of the dodo bird as fast as we can possibly make it happen.

Free market innovation rocks. Anything else is a straight road to third world nation status.

... Are people who install solar panels even in a union? What union?

Government projects.

You know that Germany has a far stronger labor movement than the US, right? And they've had this for decades. So your last sentence is surely incorrect as it stands.

They work and behave a lot differently than they do here.

german workers are more unionized than the US workers are. the workers movement was (sort of) co-inventended in germany in the 1920s ;-)

Yes, but our unions are particularly good at not working towards the overall benefit of the ecosystem. All they want to do is take-take-take and screw everyone else. Just look at the number of cities in Californian that are caving-in under the pressure of the ridiculous pensions unions have managed to extort out of the idiots running the show.

Wow. Bit of an anti-union, anti-government agenda there?

1) Solar panel installation is a highly non-unionized field. Almost all is done by independent contractors.

2) The technology behind these robot installations was developed because of government programs to increase solar use. Germany: Robotic help could be a plus given Germany's ambitious plans to get a third of its electricity from renewable sources within eight years and 80 percent by 2050 and Japan: The government of Japan commissioned PV Kraftwerker to develop a version of its robot that could install a solar power plant largely on its own in radioactive areas near the site of the Fukushima nuclear-plant disaster. Gattenlöhner says the Japanese government wants the robot within six months.

Based on that evidence, it might appear that the problem in the US might be not unionism, but a lack of government intervention in funding applications for new technologies. I'm not going to say I fully agree with that claim, but it's something worth considering....

> Wow. Bit of an anti-union, anti-government agenda there?

Absolutely. They are both responsible for a lot of what ails us today in the US. Government is incompetent and is only concerned with remaining in power through selling out to special interests. Unions are massively destructive of industries through, effectively, extorting pay and benefits that ultimately kill the goose. Check out what is going on in California with cities filing bankruptcy to a large extent due to ridiculous union worker pensions. No business person would pay any worker 70, 80 or 90% of their annual pay for life unless: a) union extortion by force of strikes and other activities or; b) government stuffing their own pockets and pandering to private and government unions by granting contracts, pay and benefits to government union workers that make no arithmetic sense in any universe.

I have seen massive solar projects done in my town. The costs are staggering. The labor is fully unionized. The money is handed down purely through political party channels.

The panels are all Chinese (so the "American Reinvestment Act" is really a "Let's shovel money to China Act".

These projects are luxurious beyond belief. A couple of them covered entire school parking lots with solar cells. Another entailed the same sort of thing with the addition of refurbishing and redoing the entire electrical system of the attached government building where, maybe, two hundred people work.

This building was brand-new before they started. They shoveled money into it and created something that no private enterprise would even consider building due to the, again, basic arithmetic or the deal: There is no possible way to recover the investment in our lifetime. If going construction / T.I. costs are in the order of $200 per square foot, these people (our government) probably spent $1,000 per square foot on this one project. This is down-right criminal.

You should know that you are barking up the wrong tree. Both Japan and Germany are both famous for having labour friendly environments. The latter should be lauded for moving its manufacturing into the 21st century, with unions and SMEs playing a huge part in ensuring this happens.

Unions are just organisations. In the Nordics and many other European countries, unions proactively work alongside employers to ensure that the workforce remains highly productive, etc.

That unions work with businesses to ensure harmony and productivity is the idea behind the CPC-run "unions" in China (I'm a mandatory member, yeh). I believe that unions should be somewhat antagonistic to keep the labor market a bit dynamic (so progress can be made); too much harmony is a big warning sign in many societies.

Speaking of such, Japan was big into factory robotics up until the mid-90s, when they took a break to take advantage of China coming online and the cheap labor that came with that. Its crazy how China set robotics back by about 10 or so years. With Chinese labor becoming more expensive, I'm sure we'll see more progress; not to mention domestic bots, in-the-field bots, and drones.

However, this is a good question: how to deal with surplus labor that gets displaced by robots? We might want to move more slowly for the sake of social stability, that 50% savings meant some guy might be out of a job. I'm not a Luddite, but we should definitely think carefully about the best way to proceed.

> this is a good question: how to deal with surplus labor that gets displaced by robots? We might want to move more slowly for the sake of social stability

I doubt the answer is to move slowly. But you've put your finger on a very real problem that needs to be addressed. To use a household analogy, innovators can be like cooks who produce wonderful meals but don't give much thought to the resulting mess in the kitchen.

Well, I am in total agreement with you, since I come from a country (Singapore) where the unions are so "completely in harmony" with employers that they might as well not exist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com