[roenxi]

I've been watching the W/$ price charts of solar panels for a while now. I don't think that argument is very good, the price trends are too consistent. It looks a lot like Germany just screwed itself over by being impatient. The AfD vote isn't the sign of a happy voter base enjoying a thriving real economy.

But it is too late now and insofar as there may be a problem, it is one for the Germans.

[oezi]

The W/$ is trending down aligned with log of volume. If there wasn't volume then there wouldn't have been a price drop and vice versa.

The Germans pay but it is most internally circulating money.

The Afd vote is mostly a vote discoupled from reality (xenophobic to begin with).

[roenxi]

I dunno, my favourite stats [0] are telling me that the solar market in Germany is actually pretty tame and they ended up going with wind.

The thing about the economies of scale is that usually there is a sort of burning front where there is some niche that an expensive technology makes sense in (like solar in remote sites) followed by slow drawing down of the cost curve and the niches that get filled moving ever more mainstream.

Forcing the issue just resulted in them phasing out a bunch of perfectly serviceable nuclear plants. It hasn't pushed solar along much compared to economic applications of the tech. I mean, maybe China have been doing something stupid to push the market along but it'd be them not Germany.

> The Afd vote is mostly a vote discoupled from reality (xenophobic to begin with).

I am agape at the sloppy thinking people use for their political enemies. Are AfD voters like mushrooms in that it rained a few years ago and they suddenly pop up? People cope with migration if times are good; but they're going to get unhappy when the economy isn't expanding in real terms.

This is the same dynamics as Trump and Brexit. You have these countries with 20%, 30% per capita energy draw downs [1] and then it turns out there is a big local populations who are rather perturbed by the fact that they are being squeezed by the hand of the market and want something to change.

It continues to amaze me how people never try to link the most obvious things that would be upsetting people to the large number of upset people. I promise to stop talking about the AfD now.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-energy-source-sub?c...

[1] EDIT I'm just going to jump back in and add this graph of GDP v. energy per capita. Some might suspect there is a link of some sort... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-...