Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?

China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.

Of course if you don't build up a local solar industry you are still dependent on foreign countries but it's not that China has an unchanging monopoly on the solar industry.

Why didn't other countries build up solar industries? Were busy with fossils? Were too greedy to subsidise?

Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.

China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.

Hypothetically, yes, such a blockaded country could develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers in 20 years, and that industry would have an easier time traveling up the learning curve on the domestic market without having to match the prices of the Chinese hyperscalers. But in about 90% of cases they would fail to do so, for the same reasons the US still doesn't have any high-speed trains 60 years after the Shinkansen entered service and still doesn't have a moon base 56 years after Neil Armstrong.

There's a reason Shanghai is known for really bad air quality. There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating

With solar and electrified transport and industry? Can't pay the loans for the solar panels? Sucks for the saps that loaned you the money. Come and take them.

There's been plenty of subsidization efforts, but they made the mistake of subsidizing technologies that were too innovative and too early on in the scaling curve. e.g. Solyndra with CIGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

> Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.

"Massive cost reduction in the existing, boring, process" beat "new technology". Possibly for the best in this case, since CIGS and CdTe are poisonous in a way that polysilicon isn't.

Now I feel old :/

And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.

Whether that makes a global conflict more or less likely is an interesting question.

It makes so little objective sense to be that angry about a failed investment in new tech that they thought there was something deeper going on that they didn't understand.

edit: I tried to Google for the source of this, but was stymied by the fact that Solyndra tried to sue Chinese manufacturers.

I did find this time capsule commentary on an NYT piece about how Chinese renewables were about to collapse back in 2012:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/ch...

The story, the blog take and the unhinged comments do a lot to explain USA losing out.

Not that all of the comments are unhinged, one upvoted to the top actually applies basic economic thinking and suggests this is just counteracting negative externalities and therefore the smart move to anyone with the eyes to see the facts clearly.

Second edit: extra context is that the blogger is funded by Charles Koch:

https://www.desmog.com/mercatus-center/

So.. lack of demand and ROI?

But that very much isn't a consequence of geology. Ramping up panel production is much easier than discovering oil deposits when there aren't any to discover.

Yeah, that's the primary concern for the US, right.

> There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating

If you wanted to say that they "produce solar panels with energy from fossils" bring your sources please.

Source? From everything I can find, at this moment China has around half of the generation coming from clean/renewable sources.

There are still a few solar panel plants in the US, but nothing like we had.

In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail. Then, of course, there is air travel. That is to say, there are alternatives.

A country completely dependent on foreign solar panels could develop non-solar alternatives. Or they could just surrender. So of course they also have alternatives. But this is existential whereas HSR is not. So, yes, it's a pretty poor comparison.

Why would you expect different behavior from others?

So either that or they'll deploy electric-arc sculptures all over the country for the population to see, listen, and smell.

And that remarkable achievement was only possible because the US does not produce evil solar panels on its soil, do I understand you right?

But since you asked, while manufacturing solar panels does not itself pose a threat to air quality, environmental and air quality regulations obviously raise the cost of doing business in the manufacturing sector broadly, which makes the US less competitive up and down the supply chain than China. That's obviously not the entire story, but it's certainly part of it.

It's not a metaphor. You're reasoning very sloppily. The absence of high-speed rail in the US is caused by a societal breakdown in technological and economic development. That breakdown also causes other effects. One of those effects is that over the last 20 years the US not only failed to develop a native industry of solar panel manufacturers; it lost the world-leading native industry of solar panel manufacturers that it already had. There's no strong reason to believe that a blockade would reverse that breakdown rather than accelerating it.

> In the U.S. one can travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper in a car than they can by rail.

Yes. That's because the US doesn't have high-speed rail, even 60 years after the Shinkansen went into service. If the US did have high-speed rail, one would be able to travel coast-to-coast faster and cheaper by rail than they could in a car. And the difference is not small.

The fastest trains on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line average 290km/h, about 3–4 times faster than a car in the US and 50% faster than even the fastest Autobahn car speeds. The peak speed is 350km/h, but as in a car, some time is wasted speeding up and slowing down at stops at the beginning and end of the trip, and along the way.

The higher speeds also lower costs; https://www.trip.com/trains/china/route/beijingnan-to-shangh... tells me that the 1300-km trip currently costs US$22 for one person, which works out to about 1.7¢ per km. In the US, driving a car typically costs 70¢ per mile https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates which is 43¢/km. So driving a car the same distance would not only take 3–4 times longer, it would cost 25 times as much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBUYDvu9XgU&t=15m25s reports that a year ago they paid US$92, which would be 7¢/km, so either trip.com is lying, they were taking a higher class of service, or the price has dropped precipitously. It looks to me like coach-class airline seating, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing%E2%80%93Shanghai_high-... tells me that when the service launched there were three classes of service.

Maybe in China cars are cheaper, in which case driving would only cost 10 times as much, I don't know. But it clearly isn't going to be as cheap as taking the high-speed train.

A consequence of the US's deficits in transportation is that a large fraction of the mental energy of its professional and intellectual classes is devoted to operating cars in traffic rather than to developing vaccines, improving Wikipedia, creating video games, or even selling ads.

60 years is a long time in terms of technological development. 60 years after the Wright Brothers achieve controlled powered flight in 01903 was 01963, when both the US and USSR had orbited cosmonauts, and the Apollo Program was well underway. 60 years after the first stored-program computer was delivered in 01949 (either the EDSAC or the secret Manchester Baby) was 02009, when Intel and AMD were shipping billion-transistor six-core processors. A wealthy country not being able to deploy the already existing technology in that time frame shows that it's experiencing not slow technological and economic development but slow collapse.

And of course financial considerations are often a first-order consideration in military conflict even today.

Renewables however flips things back.

I don't get the two party system where there's such acrimony involved in trashing and undoing anything accomplished by the opposition .

It’s hard in a capitalist country to do things that don’t make business sense - eg long term thinking. So I don’t see any reasonable route where China isn’t still making all the panels any time soon.

Long term thinking in the west is like 5 years. Long term thinking in China is 100+ years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Sri_Lankan_protests

Debt crisis and sharp spikes in fuel and oil costs resulted in shortages of both. Also shortages of fertilizer. Which resulted in shortages of food.

If I was a Sri Lankan politician I wouldn't want a repeat of that.

How and from where do you source the necessary primary materials for such an endeavor?

If you try to answer those questions you will see that you are bullshiting yourself.

But markets are far from the only mover here. Regulation, lobbying, habits... Also I guess the US would feel ashamed for not building their trains themselves in the first place, they would probably have to buy them abroad... So "proudness" is probably a factor here too.

High speed trains in the part of Europe I know are very well utilized and even a bit too crowded to my taste (still way better than planes - allow working easily with table, walking, no absurd wait times waiting in line at the airports, arrive much nearer to my actual goals...).

You do need materials, but you can source the materials anywhere on Earth; it's just a question of how expensive it is to refine them. Every element occurs as an impurity in every rock at some level. When you can import them freely, some deposits are uneconomic.

For building a plant to refine silicon, things like platinum and iridium, which are very scarce in most rocks, are very helpful. But they aren't ingredients in the solar cells themselves. Solar cells themselves are made of silicon, aluminum, silver†, lead, and tin, with trace quantities of phosphorus (or arsenic) and boron. These are mounted to "ultra-white" glass, which is made of silicon again, oxygen, sodium, calcium, and trace amounts of manganese. The mounting is done typically with EVA, which is mostly a hydrocarbon with a little oxygen in it.

The total amount of these materials is surprisingly small. The silicon wafer (2.33g/cc) is about 100μm thick, and the glass (2.5g/cc) is typically 2.5mm thick (3.2mm is "ultra thick"). So a square meter of solar panels, rated at some 200W, contains 6.3kg of glass (mostly oxygen and silicon) and 0.23kg of crystalline silicon, plus much smaller amounts of other materials.

So raw materials aren't a constraining factor unless you're living on a barge or a space station or something. Knowhow, organization, discipline, cooperation, etc., are the constraining factors. Sadly, those are in short supply almost everywhere.

______

† Silver is used for large conductive strips on the surface of the silicon; it can be replaced with copper at a significant loss of efficiency. There is already pressure to do this because the raw-materials cost of silver accounted for about 10% of the wholesale cost of current PV modules last time I checked, and about 10% of global silver production went into PV modules. Since then production has increased and PV prices have dropped.

Silicon production is an energy intensive process; you need 11-13 kWh per kg of silicon produced. Technically it's a process using electrodes and thus raw electricity so you could source it from renewable. But that's in theory you need large amount of predictable power for a long time and on demand, which is not at all what the renewables have been so far.

Then if you look into aluminum production you will see that it requires carbon electrodes, that are made in ovens continuously heated to up to 1300°C for hours on end (about 20h per anode). They do not shut down those ovens since it takes multiple WEEKS to get to temperature, and they use natural gaz as the fuel. It's not clear if we could even make an alternative using purely raw electricity that would have enough power density. The aluminum production process itself requires megawatts levels of energy, usually you need a 500MW substation. Most plants are built next to a power plant, usually coal or nuclear. At the current 200W/m2 efficient level for solar panel, you would need about 2 500 km2 of solar panel to get that much power.

Glass production also requires a lot of dense energy. It typically uses gaz for heating but maybe they can figure out an industrial process to electrify it, currently not the case anyway. We are talking about megawatts level of energy again and a glass furnace cannot ever be shut down during its 15-20 years lifetime, so it's not like intermittent renewable are an option.

And I'm not talking about the various mining operations, necessary to get the raw stuff which is basically running almost exclusively on fossil fuel (but at least some of it can be transitioned to electric).

So now, I have to say 2 things: - firstly, my question was obviously rhetoric, the answer for anyone who has studied the subject is clearly no. But that requires an understanding that isn't surface level. - secondly you are clearly an arrogant asshole who thinks he knows shit when he clearly doesn't. But I'll let you live in your fantasy world where you can have industrial production with just electricity from solar panels.

Your calculation of solar capacity is off by a factor of a million; 500 megawatts at 200W/m² is 2.5 km², not the 2500 km² you say (the size of Yosemite National Park), which would be 500 terawatts, roughly 30 times current world marketed energy consumption. The same magnitude of error in the other direction would have led you to claim that an aluminum smelting plant requires 500 watts, less power than a household blender.

You also forgot to divide by the capacity factor; 200W/m² is the nameplate capacity, what the square meter produces in full sun, not the year-round average, which is closer to 30W/m², depending on factors like latitude, clouds, and tracking. (That increases the estimate from 2.5km² to 17km², 1700 hectares or 7 sections, the area of the city of Los Altos, California, or a quarter the area of the Curonian Spit park in Kaliningrad.)

These basic errors suggest that either you are not fully aware of the extent of your knowledge, or you are knowingly exaggerating it.

It seems like your primary objection is the intermittency of solar energy, which can be straightforwardly solved with BESS; even without lithium resources, either liquid metal batteries or nickel–iron batteries are an adequate resource anywhere in the world. Sodium-ion batteries are another scalable form of BESS that does not depend on scarce elements; a 200MWh utility-scale sodium-ion battery came online a year ago in Qianjiang: https://www.energy-storage.news/first-half-world-largest-200... but plausibly nobody outside of China knows how to do this.

There are straightforward solutions to the problems you're describing, even without BESS; many haven't been developed beyond the lab scale because they aren't economically competitive with the established approaches you're describing. In a hypothetical blockaded country, those alternatives wouldn't be competing with cheap fossil fuels. In practice, though, BESS is plenty.

Silicon purification to solar grade is not simply an electrolytic process, as you incorrectly imply; it requires a series of refinement steps to become PV-grade silicon.

In the case of glassmaking, the necessary technology is already well developed. An all-electric glassblowing pilot plant entered production last year in Cognac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuK8f4cB7Ps. And you can buy off-the-shelf glassmaking furnaces for mass production: https://www.hornglass.com/products/melting-furnaces-and-equi...

Electrically heated furnaces are more controllable and versatile, which is why they are universally used in laboratory glassmaking. Unlike the case with aluminum, fossil fuels are nothing but trouble for glassmaking; limited adiabatic flame temperatures, glass-batch contamination from fuel impurities, and the unfortunate necessity to vent flame-fired furnace to the atmosphere are problems glassmakers have had to overcome in order to use cheap energy from fossil fuels, not benefits.

Carbon is probably the only possible electrode material for aluminum production, although zirconia has been suggested. The net reaction is Al₂O₃ + 3C → 2Al + 3CO, consuming about 700kg of carbon per tonne of aluminum produced. Fortunately such small quantities of carbon are not difficult to obtain, and in extremis it would even be bearable to obtain them via direct air capture; we're talking about hundreds of grams of carbon per 300-watt solar panel, so a single tree contains enough carbon to smelt the aluminum for a megawatt or so of panels.

Mining is almost entirely electrified already; attempting to run fossil-fuel machinery in an underground mine shaft, or even an indoor warehouse, poses the kind of risk of asphyxiating workers that is normally considered unacceptable except in, for example, Russia. Gargantuan strip mining machinery like the Marion 8750 is largely electric for the same reasons that diesel locomotives are electric.

Thank you for a productive, if gratuitously insulting, exchange of views!