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.
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.
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...
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.
Further that article is from 2016, it’s hyper focused on a specific shift in manufacturing while things continued to evolve over time.
You can sell some custom panels for $50,000 a watt and scale production the next day to $5,000 a watt - if volume didn’t change and price per watt was purely due to technological advance it isn’t relevant.
Find a chart that controls for panel tech, go look at who is buying said panels of said type and it’s obvious why and who is causing the price drop.
So I am saying the opposite, the price drop after solar became cheaper than coal is largely irrelevant. Once it was cheaper than coal anywhere without subsides it demand would skyrocket and prices would continue to fall as adoption increased.
Before that point PV was still useful for an ever wider range of niche applications, satellites for example can’t connect to the electric grid. Various applications where connecting to the grid was expensive or inconvenient swapped to solar at various points on that cost curve ex:sailboats. That was sped up by subsides, without which panels might still be 50$/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.
Put another way if they had been 80% cheaper than the rest of the market a 30% US tariff would have been meaningless.
That has been true in China.
was. LG is shutting down solar panel manufacturing https://electrek.co/2022/02/23/lg-electronics-is-going-to-st...
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.
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
For primary energy consumption the share of solar enery was 1.7 % in 2021.
Source: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
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.
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.
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.
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.