[patfla]

I think China played a much more important role in driving down PV module costs than Germany. Germany was one source of demand - China has amounted to about all of the supply.

Germany has an important coal industry and lobby and remains a large user of coal.

[lispm]

Germany invested a lot very early into technology building for mass production of efficient PV. The cheap mass production in China came later...

[patfla]

Actually if one looks it up (I have many times), as the Chinese industry was developing (meaning a while ago now), a large part of the key cell technology that China used came from a research group at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

There's useful research done around the world.

I think where German companies felt they might maintain a manufacturing presence was in machinery infrastructure - whether the machines that populate the factory floors that manufacture either cells of modules or machines (say, inverters) or that are used downstream of electrical production in a module.

I was last in this space some yrs ago but it's not clear to me just how much of a presence German companies have been able to keep in either.

One industry web site is here:

https://www.pv-tech.org/

and if I wanted to ascertain German presence in the industry (including some aspects of research) I might look through this site.

[chess_buster]

And our building capacity got destroyed by the government, so china took over. We were on track to be number one producers, but yeah. Same is done to wind now.