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&...