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by colechristensen
456 days ago
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>I also think that there's low risk of lock-in from buying Chinese solar products now. It's not lock-in, it's price competitiveness of locally produced solar. If Chinese solar is half price, domestic industry won't exist. If relations with China further deteriorate, they may restrict access. If there was a war we'd be out a major source of energy production/growth. Currently the US is expected to manufacture solar modules at least equal to solar installs last year. Being able to maintain production if there was an embargo, we're seeing something like a 20% year over year growth of total installed solar. |
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Current US industrial policy is vastly inadequate for bootstrapping a domestic solar industry to international competitiveness, and the US trade barriers against cheap Chinese EVs are ensmallening the future domestic electricity market. This is a problem, because that's where domestic manufacturers have to sell their product before hypothetically achieving low enough production costs to gain a foothold in export markets.
To be quantitative, the US only installed about 34GWp of PV last year https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/01/28/us-added-34-gw-of-pv-... and increased its manufacturing capacity from 14.1GWp yearly to 42.1GWp yearly https://seia.org/research-resources/us-solar-market-insight/. However, that's GWdc, and those 34GWac were actually 50GWdc. So US manufacturing capacity lags behind demand, as you'd expect given its inefficiency and consequent international uncompetitiveness.
Also, I want to point out that your idea that what companies in China should or shouldn't be allowed to produce or invest in is within the jurisdiction of the US government is a breathtaking level of central-economic-planning advocacy that even Stalin and Mao would never have admitted to. It's precisely the rejection of such central planning by Deng that permitted Mainland China to develop economically.