Like everything else in manufacturing, economy of scale wins.

There's been plenty of subsidization efforts, but they made the mistake of subsidizing technologies that were too innovative and too early on in the scaling curve. e.g. Solyndra with CIGS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

> Between 2009 and mid-2011 the price of polysilicon, the key ingredient for most competing technologies, dropped by about 89% due to Chinese advances in the Siemens process.

"Massive cost reduction in the existing, boring, process" beat "new technology". Possibly for the best in this case, since CIGS and CdTe are poisonous in a way that polysilicon isn't.

Apparently the Chinese solar industry are baffled by the US obsession with Solyndra.

It makes so little objective sense to be that angry about a failed investment in new tech that they thought there was something deeper going on that they didn't understand.

edit: I tried to Google for the source of this, but was stymied by the fact that Solyndra tried to sue Chinese manufacturers.

I did find this time capsule commentary on an NYT piece about how Chinese renewables were about to collapse back in 2012:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/ch...

The story, the blog take and the unhinged comments do a lot to explain USA losing out.

Not that all of the comments are unhinged, one upvoted to the top actually applies basic economic thinking and suggests this is just counteracting negative externalities and therefore the smart move to anyone with the eyes to see the facts clearly.

Second edit: extra context is that the blogger is funded by Charles Koch:

https://www.desmog.com/mercatus-center/

The US has a lot of obsessions foreigners make little objective sense of.

Man, Paul Krugman (here's a trigger for people who know they know better than him to respond that he's a hack!) was writing about the US giving up lead of solar tech to China back during the G. W. Bush admin... (which makes me feel old as hell)

In 1979 Jimmy Carter installed solar (thermal) panels on the White House roof as part of his fairly progressive environmental and fuel efficiency policies.

Now I feel old :/

And also angry that it's been 40 years and electricity generation is still >50% fossil fuels, never mind world energy use overall.

And Reagan tore them down. If you want to look at why we as a country suck at green energy, you don't have to look further than the Republican party behavior over the decades. The party explicitly responsible for why we can't have any number of Good Things.

Yes, but maybe not "tore" since they got reused elsewhere. Solar was (quietly) reinstated by GW, but not on the Whitehouse itself until Obama, I think. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_13562...

I don't get the two party system where there's such acrimony involved in trashing and undoing anything accomplished by the opposition .

You forgot being too concerned with maintaining environmental and air quality regulations.

There's a reason Shanghai is known for really bad air quality. There's a reason the rate of GHG emissions are accelerating

> maintaining environmental and air quality regulations

Yeah, that's the primary concern for the US, right.

The sarcasm seems unwarranted. The US has better air quality than any other country with over 50 million people and better air quality than the EU on average. Most of the countries above America on the list are either islands directly in the path of tradewinds, largely unpopulated, or the nordics. Now, a lot of this is simply the fact that Americans haven't embraced diesel and that America is a relatively low density country. But air quality is really quite good in most of the US. The Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation was very successful.

> The US has better air quality than any other country with over 50 million people and better air quality than the EU on average

And that remarkable achievement was only possible because the US does not produce evil solar panels on its soil, do I understand you right?

No? I didn't make the parent comment and I was mostly taking issue with the implication in your comment that US air quality was in some way deficient

But since you asked, while manufacturing solar panels does not itself pose a threat to air quality, environmental and air quality regulations obviously raise the cost of doing business in the manufacturing sector broadly, which makes the US less competitive up and down the supply chain than China. That's obviously not the entire story, but it's certainly part of it.

China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.

China is by far the world largest producer of green house gases.

> China builds solar panels using electricity produced by burning coal.

Source? From everything I can find, at this moment China has around half of the generation coming from clean/renewable sources.

Per-country yes China is #1, but per-capita, oil producing countries are most of the top 10 (with island nation Palau #1, inefficient transport skewed by low population).

China is also one of the top two countries by population. The other is India, at almost exactly the same number of 1.4bn.

Surely, at some point in the near future, they'll be producing solar panels using solar energy?

Well, in some 2 years their solar production trend will reach their electricity consumption trend...

So either that or they'll deploy electric-arc sculptures all over the country for the population to see, listen, and smell.

For goods we consume, though.

Point the finger at yourself. Why didn't you personally build and operate a plant?

Why would you expect different behavior from others?

I did personally build and operate a plant. Literally.

I think that is awesome. Is it still going?

We let big corporations run things and they just do what’s best for short term profit.

Long term thinking in the west is like 5 years. Long term thinking in China is 100+ years.