[kragen]

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.

[_bin_]

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.

[kragen]

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.

[_bin_]

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.

[ZeroGravitas]

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.

[mjevans]

A better solution is recognition that like all other math, patterns, and formulations of matter at micro and macro scales; those are natural patterns and the most optimal configuration for a precise enough criteria is going to be in the range of zero to one single natural solutions.

Should there be some process for rewarding those who discover those most optimal solutions to problems? Maybe.

Patents as they are currently implemented seem to be even less beneficial to the progress of science and useful arts (trades skills) than copyright. Unlike the consumer protection of brand reputation (trade mark); both create artificial scarcity and impede the development, distribution, and diversity of manufacturers of works which would benefit society and citizens.

[Jtsummers]

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

Current US foreign policy is a bit all over the place, but it's difficult to determine if the US is actually willing to go to war or not to defend its allies or even its own interests. There were the attacks on the Houthis, ok, but in order to facilitate that the US requires military bases outside the US territories proper. At the same time, the US is threatening to stop supporting allied nations, which means it's also threatening to close its bases outside the US and its territories (why would those nations host the bases if not in exchange for some degree of protection?). This will put the US in a position where it is unable to prosecute a war effectively.

This sends a signal that the present US government may not be willing to go to war. Of course, as with all things Trump this could all be bluster and provocation to see some desired action or response, we'll know more in a few months or so.

[_bin_]

I tend to agree with you. There's a valid point that we shouldn't be consigning young Americans to die in foreign wars, but I do believe we should still maintain foreign bases and a global military. I think the past several administrations have made critical mistakes w.r.t. our diplomatic and military posture.

I'm making more of a positive statement than a normative one. I'm aware the political winds are rather against me in this and wouldn't expect to be able to sell this particular set of ideas to either party, but I still believe them to be our best option.

[tuatoru]

Security is not provided by having stuff, it's provided by having the capacity to make stuff.

Importing now does not increase security.

Edit: one thing the Trump-Vance administration has done is tear through the tissue-paper screen of "rules based international order" rhetoric, exposing to plain view that we live in a world of great powers and international anarchy. As we have always done, but somehow allowed ourselves to believe naive falsehoods.

[kragen]

You know what you need to make stuff? Energy. You need energy. And that's what the US government's fossil-fuel-subsidizing bullshit is denying you.

Importing oil and gas now does not increase security, but importing PV modules does, because it gives you the capacity to produce energy from them for 20 years (module warranty period) or more likely 100 years (how long they'll actually work, though below the 80% of original capacity the warranty guarantees). Moreover, distributed generation with PV panels is enormously more resilient to being blown up by Chinese nukes or Russian, Ukrainian, or Chinese drone swarms than a few big coal power stations and oil refineries. (To say nothing of global warming.)

[_bin_]

If you're under the impression we are highly dependent on foreign producers for petroleum energy, you are mistaken. The import numbers are skewed by the fact that we directly import a lot of heavy sour stuff from canada, mexico, venezuela, etc. because we're one of the few nations that can refine it. In turn, we export a big chunk of light sweet, as it's much easier to refine elsewhere. In a pinch, refineries can switch to processing light sweet pretty easily. It's much easier than going the other way. We'd have a short-term moderate capacity shortfall but more than enough to run most of society, especially manufacturing and defense.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Importing oil and gas now does not increase security, but importing PV modules does

We aren't importing much oil and gas. Importing PVs is nice. Increasing domestic PV production is better. And in any case, we're installing record amounts of PV already [1]--the limiting factor is installation, not production.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/quarterly-solar-industry-u...

[mbrumlow]

> Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off

Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.

[kragen]

They are conventionally warranted for 20 years, but that's just a guarantee they won't lose more than 20% from their nominal capacity over that time period. Silicon PV (the kind that dominates the market currently) continues to produce after that, continuing to degrade, but more slowly than in the first decade after installation. Many of the PV panels produced in the 01970s still work today.

So embargoing or blockading PV exports to the US would be a threat that the US might start to produce less energy 20 or 30 years in the future. This is very different from the situation with oil, where the Strategic Petroleum Reserve contains 19 days of petroleum consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U....

20 years versus 19 days is a significant difference, I feel. 20 years would be long enough for a functioning country to develop a solar-module industry from scratch, though the US probably couldn't. Think about the state of the Chinese PV industry 20 years ago, for example.

[JumpCrisscross]

> embargoing or blockading PV exports to the US would be a threat that the US might start to produce less energy 20 or 30 years in the future

It means you can't replace panels destroyed and can't grow your energy production. If one side can and the other can't, that's a major problem.

> 20 years would be long enough for a functioning country to develop a solar-module industry from scratch

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best is today. We're twenty years ago.

[Jtsummers]

kragen's point is that worrying about solar panel embargos is unreasonable given the duration that panels last. An oil embargo is much more impactful to the US. A 6 month oil embargo would significantly harm the US despite our diversified energy infrastructure. A 6 month solar panel embargo wouldn't be a blip even if we were getting 100% of our energy from solar (+ battery storage, presumably). The panels we have will still be working. For it to be impactful:

1. The embargo would have to last decades.

2. The US would have to sit on its hands for those decades and deliberately choose not to develop its own manufacturing capability.

[JumpCrisscross]

> worrying about solar panel embargos is unreasonable given the duration that panels last. An oil embargo is much more impactful to the US

An oil embarge is absolutely more impactful than a PV embargo. That doesn't mean the latter isn't a problem.

> embargo would have to last decades.

My point is it wouldn't. An embargo would immediately limit America's ability to grow its energy base and replace e.g. panels destroyed closer to China (or hell, on the homeland through presumably sabotage). If you're at war and your energy is capped while your enemy's isn't, that's a strategic problem. Waiting for that predictable problem to manifest versus cauterising it today is madness.

[Jtsummers]

> Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.

They last for decades, and the resources (unlike with oil) to produce, repair, and rebuild them are readily available in the US (if through no other resources than recycling failed panels).

The biggest risk is that the US stops training engineers, scientists, and technicians who would be capable of doing that work.

[mbrumlow]

Just pointing out that they are not forever. And the use of it in reasoning if flawed. We can but 20 years of oil too. It being a long period only lessons the affect not removes it.

[Jtsummers]

> We can but [sic] 20 years of oil too.

The US annual oil demand costs around $500 billion (over 7 billion barrels used per year, but it's not all for energy). Since that does include other uses besides energy and energy demands are only increasing, it's still a useful baseline figure for estimating (because it's conservative, we'll likely need more in the future).

To acquire 20 years worth of our current demand would cost over $10 trillion (+ storage costs + future processing costs). Do you really think we can acquire 20 years worth of oil as easily as we can acquire solar panels? Panels which cost a fraction of that and don't require you to literally burn them to get energy, and instead can produce energy for decades with a little bit of maintenance (clean them, keep trees from growing over them).

[_bin_]

Here are Lazard's 2024 LCOE numbers, a popular reference (though they're often too generous regarding renewables). https://www.lazard.com/media/xemfey0k/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

You will notice that utility PV and CCGT are relatively similar in cost. Of course, replacing most of our energy infrastructure would have massive capex that one would add to the solar option. Note that the solar numbers do not include the cost of storage. And the storage requirements as you replace each GW of generation get higher, not lower.

[kragen]

Unfortunately this PDF doesn't explain Lazard's calculations, so it won't convince anyone who employs any critical thinking. Key factors like types of PV panels, whether tariffs are included or excluded, to what extent the panels' peak capacity exceeds the inverters' capacity (if at all), interest rates, etc., are not provided at all. Capacity factor is only mentioned as a broad range, with no mention of factors like what country it's in, fixed vs. sun-tracking, transmission costs for especially sunny sites, etc. Maybe it's fine if you want a rough guide, if it's correct, but it presents no evidence to show that it is correct.

Some evidence that it's not correct is that Saudi Arabia signed a PPA for wind last year at US$15.65 per MWh https://renewablesnow.com/news/saudi-arabia-signs-1-100-mw-o..., which is barely over half of Lazard's minimum LCOE for wind of US$27. So I don't think they're being too generous regarding renewables, though their solar numbers do look more reasonable.

Here's a quick LCoE exercise. Unlike Lazard, I show my work, so that, if it's wrong, anyone can see that and correct it. Suppose you're a utility that can freely import Chinese solar panels at the current €0.110/Wp (https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...) in a region where single-axis trackers give you a 25% capacity factor, you are borrowing money at 5% to build a 100-megawatt-peak plant, the panel cost is 30% of the total plant cost, and the plant life is 20 years. (These are fairly typical numbers.)

The panels will degrade over the 20-year period, so you'll only get about 90% of your rated peak power on average over that time, and the capacity factor of 25% brings that down to 23 megawatts on average. (This is front-loaded, so the panels produce more toward the beginning of the plant's life when it matters more, but let's ignore that.) This works out to about 200'000 MWh per year.

To amortize a €36.78 million loan over 20 years at 5% you need to pay €2.9 million per year.

Dividing €2.9 million by 200'000 MWh gives you €15 per MWh (1.5¢/kWh, 55¢ per gallon of gasoline, US$4.30/GJ).

This is pretty far below where current European and US solar PPAs are coming in, and about half of what Lazard gives as the low end. So, either I'm missing something fundamental, or one or more of my assumptions above is inapplicable to most of Europe and the US. Here are my best guesses about what it is:

- A lot of European plants are being built in very polar and cloudy countries like the Netherlands and Germany, so the capacity factor is much worse than 25%. Like 10%.

- The US has massive import tariffs which more than double the price of solar panels.

- Maybe balance-of-plant costs have fallen far behind the precipitous drop in solar module prices, so maybe currently the cost of modules is only 15% of the plant cost instead of the usual 30% or so.

- Maybe lenders consider solar energy projects risky and so demand higher interest rates than the 5% or so that is usual for utility bond flotation.

What do others think?

[aussiegreenie]

>Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.

I do not want to resort to Reddit-level insults but you are so misguided to imply you are trolling.

1) The Australian government is spending millions of dollars to ensure we can turn off excessive solar production to protect grid stability.

Every grid operator will do similar things when solar and wind reach 80% of the generation

2) Solar PV has an effective life of about 25 years and still produces about 75% of its nameplate capacity in 25 years.

If you are genuinely concerned about what the energy supply chain will look like in 25 years, you are either a fool or a liar or both.

Solar PV was invented at Bell Labs in 1954. Since then it has reduced in cost by more than 99.9%. And continues to fall in price.

To demonstrate how quickly solar can be deployed; Pakistan added 1/3 of its total generation capacity in 2024. That is over 17GW of solar in a poor and disorganised country.