Ideally one also manufactures them. But when you buy solar panels, one get's 30+ years of lifetime out of it. So once installed. It's tricky for China (or whoever makes time) to use them as leverage. If you cut off oil or gas there is only a few months of reserves.

You can't install them at once, as result at any point in time you'll still need to buy to cover increased demand or replace old units

Huh? What prevents you from installing them "all at once"? The downside is obviously a long stretch of no sun, and for Europe winter being both low solar production and high energy demand due to heating which the soon-to-be-cheap grid scale batteries don’t really fix. The logistics of PV don’t seem difficult though - it seems by far the easiest of the power generation methods, even if the synchronization can get a bit tricky in a large grid.

Because manufacturing isn't there to do everything at once. You install say 50gw per year, each year. In 30y you need to replace first 50gw batch and so on

Any real system will also have backups and emergency reserves.

Lean more on them as you solve the supply chain issue.

No need to make a mountain out of a molehill.

Solar panel materials are extremely toxic (current tech), or are toxic unless properly processed (hopefully, but likely, future tech).

So they won't be made in the EU, since nobody wants to make concessions here. Solar panels have the same problem as oil and mining: they will destroy nature somewhere, otherwise it doesn't work.

They don't have the same problem. They have approximately one tenth of the problem until reprocessing reduces that even further.

Which materials do you mean?

https://blog.ucs.org/charlie-hoffs/how-are-solar-panels-made...

Crystalline silicon solar panels have about 95% market share, and "By weight, the typical crystalline silicon solar panel is made of about 76% glass, 10% plastic polymer, 8% aluminum, 5% silicon, 1% copper, and less than 0.1% silver and other metals."

Everything that is manufactured is made out of atoms, and you can say that any manufacturing requires some nature destruction in the aggregate. But solar electricity requires far less mining and natural despoilation than fossil-fueled electricity.

Solar panels contain quite a bit of lead, and small amounts of cadmium. Lead can be taken out if you're willing to pay a bit more, in other words it never is. Cadmium is required. Other metals are sometimes present.

So solar panels are classified as hazardous waste.

Cadmium is only required in cadmium telluride solar panels, which have less than 5% global market share. Lead solder is still common in crystalline silicon panels, though not universal; modules built with heterojunction cells typically avoid solder because the cells can't tolerate temperatures that high:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pip.3688

My understanding is that wind turbine + PV + battery storage has a cycle where you buy once every twenty years, or more. So you buy once, and have twenty years to figure out the next buy cycle, geopolitical cycles and all.

On the fossil fuel side, you need to buy many times per year, every year. Each one of those buy events is an opportunity for an external party for stop your economy.

The renewable buy cycle is harder for an external party to interrupt.

Yeah. I've been wondering to what extent this is keeping the global geopolitics stable. Rich countries are keeping many other countries stable-ish that would otherwise rapidly devolve into disaster (obviously the middle east being the huge example). Even going so far as keeping countries stable-ish at the request of those countries (Egypt and Jordan being examples) despite those countries not really being oil countries.

When that incentive disappears, as it will, what then? There is no way in hell the middle east can defend against Iranian aggression without other people doing it for them. And it's not just the middle east. The consequences of isolationism will lower enormously. Why won't rich countries just lock the border and dig in?

We're not even that far removed from finding out what will happen, it's only about 7 years away. I'd love some early warning though.

I think you have it a bit backwards.

The reason we have Iran with an insane government and all the princes and total lack of democracy is BECAUSE of all the interference due to oil.

America and before it Britain and the colonial powers just walked in there and stole everything and so now the region is divided into countries that were soccuessfully captured (Qatar etc) and countries that threw us out (Iran).

If oil wasn’t as important it might be chaos for a while though because this dictatorships are propped up expressly so they can sell us cheap oil.

No. Iraq did not attack Iran due to oil. Iran did not counterattack Iraq because of oil. It was merely dictatorships wanting to conquer and seeing a chance to do so. Sorry.

I also worry about the "stop the economy" problem. To me, it's analogous to the AI employment problem. If you cannibalize how a country makes money and generates tax revenue, what do you do instead? For example, Nigeria makes a lot of money from oil sales. Take away the oil industry and how do they make money? Nobody can pretend to be a Nigerian prince or a businessman trying to reclaim millions of dollars.

Now that I think of it, maybe the economic fallout from AI and the oil economic devastation will be widespread fraud, just so people can survive.

There is only degrees of independence in the global economy. No country can be completely self sufficient. Having an energy infrastructure that runs for a decade or two before it starts crumpling without trade is a lot better than having an energy infrastructure that is in dire straits after a few weeks or months of embargo.