Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.
Most countries have days to, at most, months of imports of oil in reserve. In contrast, a panel embargo wouldn’t have disastrous effects for years. But reliance it is the same. If you’re dependent on Chinese panels, China can cap your energy growth at whim. The degradation will be slow thereafter, but present nevertheless.
Using foreign panels for anything other than bootstrapping domestic or allied production would be the EU repeating its follies first with Russia and then with American LNG.
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled). Since it is about 1% of the energy cost, that’s pretty inexpensive.
Also, uranium comes from suppliers on 4 different continents, there is little chance that it becomes unavailable overnight.
As someone who lives in Canada, we have reactors (CANDU) that can run on unprocessed / unenriched uranium.
Or you can use slightly enriched if you want:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANFLEX#Fuel_composition_and_v...
If you have a bunch of pesky plutonium that you want to get rid of, it can also be mixed into a MOX bundle and be 'burned away' as well.
France being more relevant as largest % of nuclear as part of their energy mix ...
As I replied in the comment to the "french doesn't need", apparently either they care more about money and less about Ukraine or they absolutely couldn't but the numbers don't lie (if they were wrong the government would have challenge le monde asap ...)...
Also globally it's "about 6% of global uranium production, 20% of conversion capacity, 46% of enrichment capacity, and 10% of nuclear fuel fabrication capacity.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
Next time I will use we ~ humanity to be more clear and avoid exceptions to the "big picture"
Have a great evening
France has reduced it in the last couple of years but even right now they do.
What’s stopping us from stockpiling solar panels?
Stockpiling uranium addresses a specific risk related to sourcing in an inexpensive way, I'm not sure what problem you address by stockpiling unused solar panels, and for what cost.
I could only find that EU manufacturers of solar panels wanted tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels and EU builders and operators of solar power plants didn't want tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-solar-industry-at-wa...
I mean the EU has ASML, the Large Hadron Collider, and ITER, among other things. There is no engineering talent problem.
If they couldn’t do it it’s a political problem.
the only interesting parts here from a supply chain perspective are power transistors. europeans have been known to design these, but idk how easy it would be to start producing them locally. they have macroscopic feature sizes though.
it would take several years of iteration to get a functioning pipeline that ran at volume, but none of this is hugely complicated. certainly not decades.
the real problem is financialization. you have to float that plant with the understanding that its not going to be competitive.
Engineers who know how to build factories, batteries, and solar panels could sit down and create a "war plan" to build out and scale infrastructure quickly if you asked them to do it and then got out of the way.
The EU has plenty of talent with the know-how to do this. If it couldn't be done even in a crisis situation, that's a political problem.
But that's residential scale: at grid scale these things wouldn't be online in the same way anyway.
"However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said. Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said."
It would not suprise me if not only Chinese manufacurers did this. Cellular modems are cheap and and the capability to cause blackout is very usefull.
Any such installations of solar panels, batteries and the like must be interconnected only in a private network without Internet access.
For remote monitoring and control a proxy mini-PC must be used, to which one should use an authenticated and encrypted connection.
For any competent person, this is trivial to do today, to ensure that even if some electronic device includes a backdoor for its vendor that backdoor cannot be accessed.
If there exists any kind of wireless connection provided by the vendor for a device, it must be disabled, e.g. by removing any internal or external antennas. Unlike wired connections that can be filtered externally, wireless connections cannot be secured.