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Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

(seanobannon.substack.com)
71 points seanobannon | 3 comments | 24 Mar 25 16:05 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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kragen ◴[24 Mar 25 17:13 UTC] No.43463237[source]▶
The most significant US regulations in the area aren't even mentioned in this article: the prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese solar modules and electric vehicles, which at least double the cost of solar panels and EVs in the US compared to much of the rest of the world.

Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determined to perpetuate that crisis, if necessary by cutting off US imports of energy production infrastructure themselves now that the foreigners won't do it for them anymore.

The article vastly understates the rapidity of the change. It projects 3 TW of new renewable generation capacity in China over the next decade (02026-02036, I suppose), attributing that to an unpublished report from a consultancy that seems to protect its projections from criticism with an NDA. Given that the PRC installed 373 GW in renewable generation capacity last year (https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/28/cont...) this seems like an implausibly low figure; linear extrapolation of installing that same amount every year would give us 3.7 TW installed over that period. But in fact it has been growing exponentially, so 20 TW of added capacity over the next decade seems like a more likely ballpark.

That's nameplate capacity, so it's closer to 4 TW of actual energy generation.

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_bin_ ◴[24 Mar 25 17:35 UTC] No.43463446[source]▶
Because we cannot afford, geopolitically, to have a hostile rival nation with whom we may in the next decade be at war control our energy. There is no if, and, or but about that.

Of course, most of said solar and battery tech was originally developed by Americans; chinese bought old patents, bought companies out of bankruptcy, and threw obscene amounts of state capital at developing it further. and now we're stuck with crap like CATL owning a huge amount of the advanced battery market. The implication that this is "just what the market decided" and that we must concede to the artificial scenario beijing has constructed, likely with the express intent of gaining leverage over more nations, is ridiculous.

Instead, we should mass-invalidate every single chinese-owned patent. She built her economy on stealing ours anyhow. Do it ourselves, or rely on allied/subordinate nations for manufacturing.

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kragen ◴[24 Mar 25 17:53 UTC] No.43463640[source]▶
You can't afford to go to war with an industrialized nation whose energy is immensely cheaper than your own, nor with a nuclear-armed nation. Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off, so importing them now would increase your energy security, not decrease it. For EVs the situation is more complex because of potential backdoors in firmware, but PV modules do not have any firmware; they are just large diodes.

I strongly disagree with both your master-race theory of technical innovation and your imperialist rhetoric. Americans, and in particular people from the US, did contribute greatly to solar and battery technological innovation. But a great deal of it was carried out outside the US, or inside the US by non-Americans, and in particular by Chinese grad students at US universities. Technological and scientific progress is inherently an international effort on behalf of all of humanity.

In terms of bringing utility-scale battery storage and PV energy production to mass production, US elites have basically opted not to participate. Unfortunately I expect that situation to continue.

Withdrawing international intellectual-property monopolies en masse is an interesting suggestion; I think it would probably promote progress, in particular because it would free other countries around the world to do the same with US patents and copyrights, which have been among the most significant obstacles to progress and even simple preservation of knowledge.

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_bin_ ◴[24 Mar 25 18:02 UTC] No.43463726[source]▶
I think you are misguided because of a true belief in "the system". The problem is systems often fail to handle bad-faith actors who intentionally abuse them. Absent a higher system, we lack good means to address this. But the system is not a moral good and we don't owe it to anyone or anything to maintain arbitrary rules when our enemies are using them to hamstring us and threaten our citizens, liberties, and way of life.

beijing has a consistent policy of subsidizing and dumping to gain dominance of key industries. metals, energy, etc. they are surely aware of the security implications of this. it seems to be their response to the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons: since those are no longer usable, create a new asymmetric situation where china can install herself as international dictator without or in addition to military force.

We can't afford not to respond. If we are unwilling to go to war, we'd have to concede to being china's bitch, which is a worse option than war.

Importing solar panels with no means to repair, replace, and resupply would absolutely make things worse; it'd increase dependence on a technology over which we lack control.

This isn't "imperialist" rhetoric, I'm quite plainly speaking in terms of maintaining our own autonomy and independence, not in terms of coercing others.

I don't think you can credit technology from foreign grad students at American universities or companies to those foreign countries. Doubly so since said chinese grad students have a long track record of facilitating the IP theft we're discussing.

Withdrawing would not free other countries to do so; the core difference here is china is a bad actor who exploits and steals IP. not to mention we could get away with this because we have a military of a certain size; smaller countries probably could not.

Regardless of whether we produce domestically, there's no particular reason why we can't work with other cheap nations within our sphere of influence (probably latam) to handle production.

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1. kragen ◴[24 Mar 25 19:29 UTC] No.43464566{3}[source]▶
I live in Argentina, so my belief in "the system" is that it's comprehensively rigged. Also, a friend of mine was raped by the police under the US-backed last Argentine dictatorship, so I'm not super enthusiastic about dictatorships like the PRC, nor about LatAm being inside the US's sphere of influence.

This dumping stuff is nonsense. If you investigate more deeply than reading PR, you'll come to the same conclusion. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43463872 for more details on that.

If "being china's bitch", as you put it, were the alternative to war, it would not be "a worse option than war", because the PRC has ICBMs and 600 nuclear warheads. War with China would mean every major US city and every Chinese city becoming a radioactive wasteland. There are people who would prefer that to some kind of unfavorable economic situation, but I do not think those people merit a place in public discourse.

What I'm advocating, however, is not that the US accept an unfavorable economic situation and give up autonomy and independence; it's that the US cease to force an unfavorable economic situation on itself by sabotaging its own energy supply, which is fundamental to both transportation and to all forms of heavy industry. The foreseeable energy future is solar, and US policy is built on wilful blindness to that fact, a blindness which will cripple its industry's capacity to compete with China over at least the next three decades.

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2. _bin_ ◴[24 Mar 25 21:36 UTC] No.43465638[source]▶
China's trade abuses are insane. Firstly, china has better than 80% marketshare. Most people agree that a monopoly of this size is net corrosive to innovation and competition. What's more, china massively subsidizes industries she prefers. Both in terms of direct subsidies, but also in that the PBOC can direct any and all banks through the country to offer privileged terms on loans or capital. This often doesn't factor into western analyses because it's simply not a tool we use. It's also not the sort of thing WTO/GATT rules are written to consider, see prior comment about the system not being set up to deal with chinese. You're right that there's less evidence of explicit dumping under international law, though since the domestic chinese solar market is so much smaller that's not an entirely meaningful number, but I was using it more as a colloquialism people would recognize to indicate state-backed overcapacity to knock out competition than as a legal term of art.

And you're assuming being stuck under the thumb of an illiberal regime hostile to our beliefs and way of life, a regime with a long history of violating basic liberties, of mass murder, and of ethnic (han) supremacy, would stop at trade concessions. I don't believe we could reach a point where we could make tolerable policy changes to appease the PRC.

I don't think it's an issue of us being blind. There are plenty of contributing factors. For one, we are terrible at industrial policy and it's ridden with recapture. E.g. Ford shutting down a battery plant because the UAW demanded (and gov't generally supported) the fact that they'd have to re-hire and re-train tons of UAW employees at the new factory. This is objectively not the way to handle what we believe to be a critical energy supply issue. The fact that it's become incredibly difficult to produce solar panels or batteries competitively, both due to higher wages and more stringent regulations than one would find in china. This is exacerbated by decades of conspiracy to wink-and-nod at illegal immigration suppressing investment in automation, meaning catch-up would be painful and take time. Etc.

There's also the fact that, as it stands now, we cannot replace our grid with renewables. It's also much easier to make a large chunk of it nuclear, but the environmental/clean energy groups have mostly been captured by nuke-hating tree-huggers for half a century now. Objectively you do not want to make all your generation wind/solar because your storage requirements are much higher, because the LCOE numbers people use in their calculations (Lazard's are popular) are notoriously bad, and because storage tech either isn't there yet or is cost-prohibitive.

I am very frustrated by people who 1. try to reduce this to "one simple thing" that they happen to support, and likely supported long before and apart from current issues, 2. people who see it as an opportunity for recapture, and 3. the head-in-the-sand denialists who just don't know or care that America's position and people are threatened by the way things are headed.

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3. ZeroGravitas ◴[25 Mar 25 08:02 UTC] No.43468929[source]▶
Your last two paragraphs are almost perfect satire.

Renewables don't work. Nuclear is much easier. It's the environmentalists at fault. LCOE is notoriously bad. Storage doesn't work.

Also, you're angry at people who are head in the sand denialists who don't realise or care that America is under threat.

The person you're discussing this with is totally correct. America is throwing away it's future with this approach to energy. And you are a perfect avatar of the people enthusiasticly commiting this self-destruction.