China had little to do with the root causes, which largely relate to simple economies of scale and massive R&D investments. You can look at various log plots and the same tends continue for decades. If anything I would suggest Germany as the country that really subsidized early solar to reach the point of economic viability, almost everything after that point was just economics and market fluctuations. That said as of 2020 China does have 32% of global solar capacity installed, which has pushed prices even lower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics#/media...

The slight price bump around 2002-2005 relates to them starting to be financially viable with subsides resulting in a shortage, but factories where being spun up worldwide to meet demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics#/media...

While panel costs have continued to drop they stopped being a significant issue for adoption years ago. Prices that used to be incidental such as labor, inverters, and grid connections now make up an increasing share of insulation costs.

No. It was china. Their productive capacity is what lower solar panel prices. So much so that we blocked chinese solar panels/materials to protect our solar panel industry.

On the one hand, cheap chinese solar panels is a good thing for the environment. But it can be terrible for solar panel manufacturers in the US and EU. At the end of the day, industry/jobs always trumps environment.

If “it was China” then explain the drop from 100$ -> 4$ that preceded China’s involvement and then what changed. Trump did add a 30% import tax, but that’s almost a rounding error on the price drops we are talking about.

Some US and EU manufactures where able to keep up with the price drops and they would have reached similar price drops with or without any involvement from China. Completion and increased investment (Ed: and arguably dumping) did result in a short term drop in prices, but current prices are in line with trends going back to the 1970’s.

For example LG Solar, a South Korean company, is manufacturing 500 megawatts of solar panels annually in Huntsville, AL cost competitively. SunPower a US company manufactures some of the highest efficiency mass market solar cells in Malaysia and the Philippines etc.

People want to simplify things and say country X did Y, but it’s far more complicated especially when you look into how long it takes to bring new manufacturing methods to market.

Your charts are misleading because they conflate price per watt in one and a log scale in the other.

The consensus is that China is what really accelerated the price drops. Not sure why basic facts are being disputed lol

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...

That’s missing the forest for the trees. Why did the prices drop by 99% over 4 decades, is a more central question. https://news.mit.edu/2018/explaining-dropping-solar-cost-112.... An 80% drop alone from 1980 would mean panels where 20x as expensive right now.

As to the second chart not being log scale that choice was made by Wikipedia, you can easily plot it on log scale, but it looks even more like a strait line.

Read the article - yes other countries also contributed but it was mainly China that propelled the majority of the price drop through aggressive production.

I did, suggesting China was the only country responsible would mean the price would have been unchanged across 12 years which really doesn’t fit the available data.

Further that article is from 2016, it’s hyper focused on a specific shift in manufacturing while things continued to evolve over time.

The price is not really relevant without looking at volume. Go look at a price and volume chart. Nobody was buying solar panels in significant quantities for $1000/watt. I don’t know what you’re so hung up on that.

You can sell some custom panels for $50,000 a watt and scale production the next day to $5,000 a watt - if volume didn’t change and price per watt was purely due to technological advance it isn’t relevant.

Find a chart that controls for panel tech, go look at who is buying said panels of said type and it’s obvious why and who is causing the price drop.

Look at the first curve, adoption was increasing even just between 1990 and 1991, 1991 and 1992 etc etc.

So I am saying the opposite, the price drop after solar became cheaper than coal is largely irrelevant. Once it was cheaper than coal anywhere without subsides it demand would skyrocket and prices would continue to fall as adoption increased.

Before that point PV was still useful for an ever wider range of niche applications, satellites for example can’t connect to the electric grid. Various applications where connecting to the grid was expensive or inconvenient swapped to solar at various points on that cost curve ex:sailboats. That was sped up by subsides, without which panels might still be 50$/watt and mostly used for calculators etc.

After bridging the vast technical gap to become cost competitive with coal adoption was going to increase dramatically, no subsides needed. So sure without China panels might be 20-50% more expensive, but that simply isn’t a big deal because PV would still be the cheapest option.

Facts are disputed when they cannot possibly fit in the narrative we want/need to believe.

I don’t dispute Chinese manufactures on net dropped the price by about 20% vs the rest of the market and additional competition further reduced prices, the issue is solar prices dropped by ~80% from 2009 to now so that 20% isn’t the root cause.

Put another way if they had been 80% cheaper than the rest of the market a 30% US tariff would have been meaningless.

When you don't have to make a profit and your capital investments are staked by state (both local and national), it's easier to invest large amounts in capacity.

That has been true in China.

Two strong refinements in a row. (Rebuttals is too strong a word.) I don’t consider myself particularly knowledgeable, but find your statements resonate with my understanding. China did help but did not initiate or innovate at a high level.

>For example LG Solar, a South Korean company, is manufacturing 500 megawatts of solar panels annually in Huntsville, AL cost competitively.

was. LG is shutting down solar panel manufacturing https://electrek.co/2022/02/23/lg-electronics-is-going-to-st...

And China has a solar manifacturing base because Germany subsidized PV heavily. Local manufacturers didn't care that much about prizes, due to subsidies, Chinese manufacturers saw a market. Supported by the Chibese government, they did build the manufacturing base. And squezzed German manufacturers out of it. The market, for quite a while, still was Germany and Spain. The latter changed.

So the initial boost came from Germany (and a green-social-democrat goverment), that enabled the mainly Chinese manufacturers to continue the constant cost reductions ever since.

And the moment China had the manufacturing base the German government decided to massively reduce the subsidiaries for solar. More or less killing the German solar industry.

One could argue that that is what the market should do with non competitive players.

But on the other hand more jobs were lost in solar than are now being saved in coal with massive subsidiaries (on the scale of 80k € per job in the coal industry towards the companies in that market if I remember correctly).

While I as a consumer have to pay around 1/3 of my gas price as 'tax' for the development of eco friendly tech.

Were the solar subsidiaries still in place when we bought and remodeled our home we would have gone more solar than just a little bit for hot water. It just didn't calculate for a two person home on the timescale of 30 years. And solar panels back then had an estimated lifespan of 15 to 25 years.

But that is just anecdata

Yep, they did kill the German solar indusyry that way. Not that German solar companies were, after years if not decades of competition free existence, realy competetive.

German subsidies were paid on installation, meaning that Chinese producers were beneficiaries of the policy as much as domestic EU producers were.

What percentage of power in Germany comes from solar?

For power production the share of solar enery was 8.8 % in 2021.

For primary energy consumption the share of solar enery was 1.7 % in 2021.

Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

You have to be careful comparing primary energy to PV output.

Primary energy is thermal energy before conversion to work. PV's output has already been converted to electrical energy. One kWh of PV output displaces several kWh of primary thermal energy.

About 10%.

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&...

> While panel costs have continued to drop they stopped being a significant issue for adoption years ago. Prices that used to be incidental such as labor, inverters, and grid connections now make up an increasing share of insulation costs.

This is the biggest road block in the US (that and utilities not wanting to let people pay them less money). In Europe prices are typically around €1/W for a residential install - and even less if you include incentives. In the US prices are typically 2-3x that.

Residential solar is largely a scam to game the utility rate structure, where the cost of the network (and having power available from it when you might need it) was rolled into the per-kWh rate. That doesn't work if enough customers install PV and have correlated expectation for backup power.

Utility-scale PV just makes so much more sense than grid-connected residential solar. It's easier and cheaper to install. The objection that it uses more land is without merit in the US, where land cost is largely negligible.

Here in Norway my electricity bill has three components that I pay to two different entities: I pay one company for the actual energy and the owner of the network for the fixed costs of the network and the cost of transporting the energy (the losses in the network).

It's not just the cost of the network and the cost of transporting energy, it's the capital cost of those generators sitting out on the network that need to be running when lots of people suddenly say "no sun, give me power". Norway is blessed with lots of hydro that can do that, though.

As a counterpoint to this, a lot of the Chinese air improvement has come by moving factories downwind of the major cities. While Chinese air has gotten better, the air quality in Korea (on days when prevailing winds come from China) has gotten much worse since 2009, as coal is still the majority power source for them.

Last I saw, China has 97% of the world's electric buses, and probably a similar figure for taxis.

The scale and transition is crazy and rapid. The savings on fuel alone easily made the upfront cost worth it; growing a new industry and cleaning up the air were nice bonuses

Yes and I've seen the transition happen before my eyes as i have visited China at least couple of times a year ever since the early 2010s till literally the weekend before the Pandemic blew up. I still remember the air pollution of old (which made me decide to NOT take up a role with a promotion offered to me there at one point as my family members are asthmatic) and how one of my direct reports there used to get continuous coughing bouts every winter and hasn't really had them in the last couple of years.

What is also interesting that a lot of this approaches are pragmatic instead of holistic.

I.e. you can pragmatically already use electric vehicles in many places.

But transition away from coal power plants will still take quite a while.

I used to work with company part-taking public transport infrastructure and the number of projects that regularly popped up was large. And in places most of us have never heard off. In the end all of this electric transport.

> IIRC at that time coal power and other industrial production had to be stopped for a couple of months in the surrounding provinces to make the games happen and people (importantly top bureaucrats who lived in Beijing) decided they liked the clean air.

I think this undersells the demand for clean air. It's a huge political issue in China, one which animates people on the street even though the people of China are legendarily passive on political questions. If the government saw any way to clean up the air without impoverishing the country, they'd be all over it. You don't need to face reelection to appreciate a free win.

A brief experience of clean air in Beijing is a small thing compared to the constant massive demand for cleaner air everywhere.

I remember visitors from China about ten years ago asking why the air in the US was so clean. I explained it was lower population density and the Clean Air Act. The latter has been so enormously successful (estimated benefit some 40 times the estimated cost) that not even Republicans object to it.

Yeah I'm pretty sure with removing Russia as a gas supplier to Europe renewables are going to get pushed even harder there. Other regions too.

Honestly cutting out Russia as a gas supplier is one of the most interesting considerations.

- It would probably be what hurts Russia most

- It might have pretty good long-term effects

- But it also would hurt the EU a lot, especially eastern EU countries, like the _huge_ majority of heating (both rooms and water) in Germany is done by Gas (through also by house-central gas powered heating units in many cases). Also gas-powered ovens and stoves are still pretty common, too. This is not something which can be easily migrated, even less until next winter. So doing this decision will lead to quite a bit of civil hardship and even death next winter... It might still be the right thing to do. I just don't see it happen tbh.

Removing Russia as gas supplier doesn't have to happen until next winter. It's a long term strategic decision. With proper incentives Europe could probably cut it's gas imports in half in the next five years through investment in renewable energy and become completely independent of Russian gas shortly after.

It isn’t entirely up to Germany to decide on a strategy that works for them. With the restrictions on SWIFT it’s entirely plausible that deliveries will seize, either because there no way to pay for them, or because Russia is willing to hurt itself in retribution.

Stores will get Hermany over the winter. No matter what happens, there will be a major push to improve efficiencies. Next winter might also see a return of COVID-era home office policies, allowing offices to shut down and reduce demand.

WFH may allow to reduce heating in offices, but will increase heating in homes. Net effect may be zero.

Meh SWIFT is a mild inconvenience. There is CIPS, BTC and even barter of goods. How to pay for a few billion euros of gas is the smallest problem.

EU wide subsidies for moving off gas to renewables (water heating is downright easy) would do wonders.

> lead to quite a bit of civil hardship and even death next winter.

Death? Hardly. Most German homes are well isolated and can be heated quite efficiently. If gas cuts out one can use an electric stove. Same for cooking, one can use an electric hob.

So hardship—yes, especially for the poorest living in undermaintained homes and no resources to upgrade. Germany will certainly put in support programmes for those affected.

> If gas cuts out one can use an electric stove.

That statement seems to conveniently ignore the reality of how electricity is generated and how much of it is available.

Cut off the gas supply without adequate notice, and the power grid will fail.

In practice there will be gas rationing.

By the way, is the German power grid really reliant on gas to such an extent?

It's not that the grid is reliant on gas, it's that if people switch from gas to electric for heat quickly, the grid might not be able to handle the sudden extra load.

Either way, it is known how much gas is available. It can also be estimated fairly reliably how much gas will be used a couple of days in advance, given the weather forecast. Therefore a gas shortage will be known in advance, and contingency measures will be taken, both for gas and electricity.

Germany is the richest affected country. There will be deaths in the eastern EU if this is done without massive western financial support, any COVID-related budget will be dwarfed 100x by what is needed for this, no eastern state has nearly enough money for it even if they dedicated their entire budget.

Eastern Europe has its own coal resources and coal heating is widespread. It isn't good for the emissions wise but it wont freeze.

We have the same situation with gas powered heating in the UK. There is a push towards heat pumps, but they are often expensive up front and don’t always save money in the long term (although if gas prices skyrocket this would obviously change).

I've been using a DIY air source heat pump (repurposed conventional air conditioner) for the last 6 years and the investment has been quite successful. Roughly the same bill as with gas, but I don't go through annual inspections etc. I paid ~EUR2500 for the whole heat pump installation. Unfortunately, conventional heat pumps (e.g. Mitsubishi, Daikin, LG etc) with the same capacity were priced about 3x that and as other have pointed out, were not economically feasible. Possible explanations for the latter are either marketing gimmicks (heat pumps are for the rich) or a lack of big enough addressable market.

I am not sure how easy it is to repurpose newer air conditioners that have a lot more electronics. Also keep in mind that in order to use a heat pumps efficiently, your heating system must be designed to work with relatively low fluid temperatures (mine runs at ~37 degrees centigrade). What worked best for me was a heated wall + fan convector for the living spaces and oversized radiators for the bedrooms.

Europe also gets gas from the North Sea countries Norway/UK/Netherlands, also Algeria and Libya. It can also import from US and Middle East via ship. Russia is a critical supplier but it isn't everything.

I agree. But cutting imports from Russia quickly will be a major task. Is the US going to support the EU with subsidized energy to help with the transformation?

Shares of EU imports as of 2019 from Russia where as follows:

    Coal: 46.7 %
    Gas: 41.1 %
    Crude oil: 26.9 %
    

(Note: These figures are shares of imports, i.e. they do not consider domestic EU production.)

Source: Eurostat at https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/infographs/energy/bloc-2...

Yes, my assessment was based on this knowledge.

EDIT: Maybe I should add a bit of context: Even if Gas can be filled in from other sources there are limits and the price will hike quite a bit even if there is enough. Furthermore it's unlikely that Russia will take it lying down, cyber attacks on infrastructure for deviling Gas are to be expected and maybe even physical sabotage. At the same time to safe money many Countries have kept increasingly smaller Gas reserves in recent years.

One can not switch overnight to LNG. The infrastructure does not exist for it.

Not even USA is cutting out russian oil, why should europe?

I flew over western China back around 2015 (Shanghai->Amsterdam) I have never seen so many windmills, hundreds of them, spread around open cast (probably coal) mines and power plants, probably sharing the same power grids