First published JoNova; Subsidising capacity expansion in the middle of a glut – these jobs will evaporate as soon as the subsidies dry up.
Global glut turns solar panels into garden fencing option
Europeans find alternative location for cheap green technology with cost of rooftop installation so high
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“This is the result of solar panels getting so cheap that we’re just putting them everywhere,” said Jenny Chase, lead solar analyst at BloombergNEF. “Since installation cost — labour, scaffolding — is the vast majority of the cost of installing a rooftop PV [photovoltaic] system, it can make sense.”
“Why put up a fence when you can just put up a load of solar panels, even if they’re not aligned exactly to the sun?” says Martin Brough, head of climate research at BNP Paribas Exane. “Where the panels themselves are just incredibly cheap, the constraints become the installation costs and the sites . . . you get a bit of a DIY mentality.”
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In Europe, industry executives are warning of imminent trouble for a sector that has been plagued by job losses, bankruptcies and closures in recent months.
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Read more: https://www.ft.com/content/2ea6bf6d-04e9-453b-a35f-cd6431cfc7bf
You would think a market signal like this, where even Chinese manufacturers are beating a retreat, might be an indication to avoid investing in solar panel manufacturing. But the economic incompetents who run Australia have no intention of letting a savage global glut in manufacturing deter them from wasting taxpayer’s money.
Solar Sunshot for our regions
Thursday 28 March 2024
The Hon Chris Bowen MP Minister for Climate Change and Energy
The Hon Ed Husic MP Minister for Industry and Science
The Hon Penny Sharpe MLC NSW Minister for Climate Change and Energy
The Hon Courtney Houssos MLC NSW Minister for Domestic Manufacturing and Government ProcurementThe Albanese Government’s $1 billion investment in the Solar Sunshot program will supercharge Australia’s ambition to become a renewable energy super power at home and abroad.
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Solar SunShot will help Australia capture more of the global solar manufacturing supply chain through support, including production subsidies and grants.
This will help ensure more solar panels are made in Australia, including in the Hunter Region, where the Prime Minister made the announcement at the site of the former coal-fired Liddell Power Station.
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“Australian research helped invent the modern solar panel – today’s announcement is about creating Australian jobs to help manufacture them. [Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen]
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“Solar panels were our idea, we should be making them here and that’s what we’ll do. Aussie know-how is creating Aussie jobs, that’s what a future made in Australia is all about.” [Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic]
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Read more: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/solar-sunshot-our-regions
Those jobs make no economic sense, they will exist at the pleasure of politicians, and will evaporate as soon as the subsidies dry up. What a shocking betrayal of the workers.
Manufacturing solar panels is an energy intensive process. It requires vast amounts of cheap, dispatchable energy. Coal producing regions of China dominate solar manufacturing, because they can supply the steady, low cost supply of power required to run silicon manufacturing processes such as zone melting, a critical stage in the solar manufacturing process in which a rod of silicon is run through a 1400C (2500F) furnace – the impurities collect in the melt spot.
The current glut of solar panels cannot supply the magnitude of reliable energy required for these processes. No renewable source other than hydro can supply the energy required. That energy has to be rock solid dispatchable, otherwise entire batches of silicon material can be ruined. Solar manufacturing requires absolute precision to produce product of the required purity.
Only coal, nuclear and gas can supply the magnitude and stability of energy required to manufacture solar panels, at a price comparable to China.
The saddest part of this charade, Australia actually has the capacity to challenge Chinese manufacturing. All we need is for politicians to remove Australia’s obstacles to competitiveness.
If Australia ditched green energy targets, and made full use of our coal and nuclear energy resources, we could go toe to toe with China in terms of energy cost.
Australia was once a manufacturing powerhouse in the 1950s, we could become that powerhouse again. But first we would need to get rid of the parade of political incompetents who for over 70 years have squandered Australia’s opportunities by messing up the economy and throwing money at pointless stunts, like this latest “Solar Sureshot” boondoggle.
Again, being innumerate is a requirement to be a green.
60% of Australian voters rejected a federal government referendum the proposal to change the Constitution about Aboriginal affairs. Majority in all States and Territories – except the Australian Capital Territory where Canberra is. It was quite clear that the politicians were trying to govern by decree, when the people want the government to act to the wishes of the people.
There is a similar disconnect with electricity supply. The government is imposing it’s trendy, incorrect ideas on the people, instead of making policies that voters want. Voters want cheap, reliable electricity that attracts investment in smelters, refineries and general manufacturing that have all but disappeared in the last few years.
The government is able to maintain an illusion because it lies. Voters often hear the lie that renewables are the cheapest way to make electricity, while reports showing this to be wrong are censored or criticised.
It is as if Australia has grown into 2 different civilisations, one that votes for the will of the people and one that acts to deny it. This is intolerable. It cannot last. It will not last. Signs of the shootout are emerging daily.
Geoff S
Welcome to America.
Why we want to create and follow the dystopian path shown in the Hunger Games films or written about in 1984, I simply can not understand other than a poor educational system.
Renewables are ONLY cheap if one considers the cost of fuel alone as the ONLY driver to the cost of energy. However, when the cost and availability of materials necessary to create, install and maintain that “Free” energy generation is factored in and found to be extensively greater than traditional Fossil Generation due to both the Low Density and significantly Shorter Lifespan nature of renewables, they prove to be far costlier and thereby increase the cost of energy while not actually reducing emissions cradle to grave.
Well…there is one other thing about renewable that’s CHEAP. They are mostly manufactured in China to Chinese standards.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Government has no business in the energy business. Government is dishonest, unaccountable, untrustworthy and inept. Remove government from energy production and transmission and our energy issues disappear.
Remove government from many more things too!
Shrink Government by 50% and decrease the tax burden similarly. In fact you could eliminate almost 80% of government pork $$$ by reducing the proper 50% of government
If that is to be done; it won’t, but if it did then you’ll have a huge unemployment problem to deal with….the largest workforce in most countries are federal employees. No politician or better yet “Deep State” will ever reduce the size of government.
How come I’m not surprised that another “Green New Deal” has failed because the hype FAR exceeded the demand that the government was going to produce through damaging legislation? In California we went through a period (60s ?) where total electric homes were being built and touted as the ‘way of the future’. “Clean living.” They didn’t do the math on that one and the homes quickly fell out of style with rising electricity costs. So solar panels are being used to protect privacy rather than collect sun?
Yes but what a wonderful opportunity for Bowen and co. to demonstrate what they often assert about renewables viz. to have a solar PV plant on some greenfield site off-grid and powered by Australia’s abundant cheap solar energy!
In that way we could establish over the average life of a solar panel the ratio of panels produced to panels required to produce them.
Of course that would not include the energy used in mining transportation installation and disposal.
They’re actually proposing placing them over uncovered aquaducts used for crop irrigation and drinking water supply to produce energy. What happens to the water supply when the panels begin to degrade and start leeching heavy metals into that water supply??
Blackout Bowen at it again!! He’s on a mission to destroy our economy!
Sounds a lot like Blackout Biden.
Black Outs Matter
Sovereign risk is mounting for wind and solar subsidy farming. The last COP increased the risk because nuclear is now squarely on the agenda.
The front runners in NutZero are now hitting the wall. 30% of market share is possible without storage. Getting above that level requires storage or a load/generator that acts like storage; for example, the way SA uses Victoria as a battery or Germany uses Norway.
The only wether dependent generation that is still going in at significant level in Australia is rooftop. No grid scale WDG can compete with rooftops because there is no price signal. They only reduce output on system overvoltage. A common occurrence in Australia now and requires big expenditure at distribution level to cope with reverse power flow. Something the distributors really like because they are guaranteed a return on investment.
One way for the LNP to encourage nuclear is to remove all WDG based consumer theft and establish government backed bonds for the construction of nuclear. Removing the theft will put money back into consumer pockets immediately. Some may see investment in nuclear as a sensible way to go.
Snowy 2 will end costing AUD30bn and is an energy sink. That amount of money might get a couple of 2GW nuclear plants, depending on where you shop.
What’s the efficiency of a vertical solar panel anyway?
The panel doesn’t have problems with snow falling on it, (wind driven may still cause problems).
It doesn’t have a problem with bird droppings landing on it, (wind and target practice excepted).
In high latitudes, pointing toward the equator, it could be better than horizontal even if slightly tilted and of course it would cool down better in direct sun, improving the efficiency, (or otherwise reducing the losses). Nearer to the equator the panel would lose efficiency in summer when it would be backlit for the first and last hours of the day due to the sun rising and setting on the non-equator side of east and west, (assuming the panel was aligned to point at the equator).
The panel would be exposed to more lateral wind loads, that means more supports required, read costs.
I had some panels mounted on the SIDE of a garage, pointing north but leaning about 20 degrees from the vertical, (at 38S latitude), and found them to be fine in winter but not so good in summer. They shed heat better in summer, a win. Their downfall was the lawnmower which threw one stone. And now they are on the roof where they belong.
There are tests ongoing showing that bifacial solar panels, mounted vertically and facing east-west, produce as much or more power over the course of a day than angled panels aimed toward the equator. The typical PV system has equator facing panels, set at the latitude degrees of the site. That outs the panels directly facing the Sun at the Fall and Spring Equinoxes. Power production drops a little at Summer Solstice due to the off angle but is partially made up by the energy having to go through less thickness of atmosphere. Performance with a fixed angle PV installation is worst at the winter solstice since the Sun being lower in the sky and above the horizon for less time per day adds up to less total insolation plus more energy absorbed by traveling a longer distance through the atmosphere.
Adjustable altitude angle can help significantly with the varying Sun height to produce more power. Many sites just change panel angle one or more times each year. Some have active tracking to constantly change the altitude angle to maximize production each day, but it falls off significantly in morning and evening due to the extreme side angle to the Sun.
Vertical panels facing east-west have a better angle to the Sun as soon as the Sun rises high enough the rows of panels aren’t shading one another. Shorter panel height is better at maximizing the total productive time per day. Where the power output curve of an angled, equator facing panel tapers up in the morning and down in the evening, with a high peak mid-day, the east-west orientation has a quick morning rise with a more even curve and the reverse after mid-day. There is a drop mid-day but light colored ground cover (such as white gravel) can help that by scatter reflecting light up/sideways at the panels.
Here’s an article on one of the test setups. https://undecidedmf.com/have-we-been-doing-solar-wrong-all-along/
I bought a couple of small, flexible solar panels with a 5V USB charge port on the back. I took one outside on a bright and cloudless day to see how well it would charge my Android phone. I used the Ampere app to measure the charging current. Face up towards the Sun it did pretty good, it would take a while to charge. Then I turned the panel face down. Held a couple of inches above the black painted metal and gray weathered woof of a truck’s flatbed it produced more power. Set face down on the truck bed it dropped to near zero. Apparently direct Sunlight was penetrating the translucent white backing to the PV cells, and combined with some scattered reflection off the truck bed to the clear front side of the panel it performed better. I should have put a sheet of printer paper under it to see how that affected it.
ha I had the same idea for pv panels…except I want to use the dud ones, keeps them outta landfil n gives me cheap(free) fencing
So why have Aussies continued to vote for “the parade of political incompetents”?
I wish I knew.
If that were to come to pass, all the over educated lefties would need to get real PRODUCTIVE jobs in manufacturing (actually maintenance since almost any new factory will be predominantly robotic) instead of living off the liberal full employment policies of modern “western” governments.
Get rid of 80% of government jobs, stop government funding NGO nonprofits and make the massive overhead of liberals become part of PRODUCTIVE society.
And as Reagan believed, a rising tide lifts all boats, i.e., in a more PRODUCTIVE society, everyone has a better standard of living.
The left believes in a zero sum economy. There is only so much so THEY must redistribute it according to their desires. So their policies pay people to do nothing but vote for them.
A conservative knows harder or more work produces MORE of everything.
Australians need to place a pause on this and carefully weigh up the competing planet saving seed money. I feel firing up the defunct Holden car plant to produce battery Cruzes could change the weather better for the billion bucks and feelings matter.
Maybe somebody should set up the world’s largest falling dominos chain reaction? 😎
It is low quality voting decisions for decades is to blame for why they are in serious trouble today, is it the water, or the low IQ sperm level of the population or is it watered down schooling…….