Essay by Eric Worrall
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen have announced a joint agreement to break China’s dominance of solar and wind manufacture.
Breaking from China’s clean energy dominance ‘imperative’, US and Australia say after new climate tech deal
New agreement to fast-track climate solutions signed as countries underscore need for diversified supply chains
Adam Morton Climate and environment editor
@adamlmorton Tue 12 Jul 2022 18.58 AEST…
In a joint press conference in Sydney, the US energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, and the Australian climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, announced a “net zero technology acceleration partnership”, including an initial focus on long-duration energy storage and digitising power grids.
They said the agreement was motivated in part by the need for a clean energy and critical mineral supply chain that did not depend as much on China, which is responsible for about 80% of solar energy technology manufacturing. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), it is expected to reach 95% by 2025.
Granholm compared the risk of relying on China for clean technology to the west’s over-dependence on Russian fossil fuels – a mistake that sparked a global energy crisis after it invaded Ukraine.
“I worry that China has big-footed a lot of the technology and supply chains that could make us vulnerable if we don’t develop our own supply chains,” she said. “From an energy security point of view, it is imperative that nations that share the same values develop our own supply chains, not just for the climate, but for our energy security.
“We’ve seen what happens when we rely too much on one entity for our source of fuel, and we don’t want that to happen – so to diversify those energy sources and to link up with partners is part of our energy security.”
Bowen agreed. “It’s good for our own economies and it’s good for our national security to have supply chains among ourselves, but also amongst friends and allies,” he said.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/12/breaking-from-chinas-clean-energy-dominance-imperative-us-and-australia-say-after-new-climate-tech-deal
It is no mystery why China dominates intermittent solar and wind manufacturing.
Solar and wind manufacturing is energy intensive. Chinese energy is cheaper than Western energy, because China burns coal for energy.
The USA and Australia can make all the agreements they want to “break China’s dominance”, but so long as nobody addresses the underlying problem, so long as China can outcompete US and Australian energy intensive manufacturers because of lower Chinese energy costs, those agreements are not worth the paper they are written on.
“In a joint press conference in Sydney, the US energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, and the Australian climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, announced a “net zero technology acceleration partnership”, including an initial focus on long-duration energy storage and digitising power grids.”
What is “digitising power grids” ? on – off – on – off ??
more like on – off – off – off <sun comes out> on – <cloud> off – <nighttime> – off…
The CCP is laughing so hard at the idiots we have (allegedly) put in charge.
Central coast Cali, our neighborhood had another two hour blackout from 7 PM -9 PM. Getting used to it, 3rd world.
In Cape Town we have had three two hour blackouts a day for weeks now. This weekend will be the first blackout free days for months.
No, Rico, WE haven’t put any of them ‘in charge’! That was entirely the doing of our supposed president. He tends to hire ONLY those who are inexperienced, untrained and/or simply incompetent.
Yep. Since long term energy storage is a fantasy they need to be able to turn our power off remotely every time the wind & solar fail.
Several long term energy storage solutions already exist in nature, they’re called fossil fuels!
The current crop of Western Politicians are either too dumb or too corrupted to stop the fossil fuel witch hunt.
Or, perhaps, being paid much to NOT stop it?
Which, in many areas, is about every other day, now. Putting your faith in unreliable energy sources (solar, wind) is a fools game. So, WHY is the world spending literally $BILLIONS (if not $Trillions) on unreliables? And, so far, “long-duration energy storage” is nothing but a pipe dream! A ‘long duration’ one, in fact!
Joking aside, does anyone know what “digitising power grids” actually means??
Is that when they give the middle finger to the public?
Basically it IS a joke on the consumer – they can digitally restrict consumption instead of load-shedding sections of the grid. In principle, some voluntarily displaced consumption is not too harmful – slowing down the battery charging to miss peak demand, or delaying the washer/dryer by an hour. However, the car NOT being charged when needed for the hospital visit, or the unwashed uniform resulting in a reprimand, could have serious negative impacts. The digital communications can also request more generating capacity to come on (or off) line – which, basically is shouting “we need more power NOW” or “disconnect the turbines NOW” instead of planning ahead and requesting additional generating capacity in advance of it being needed.
https://www.power-and-beyond.com/power-grid-digitalization-a-1004473/
or bouncing the volts to force PV on roofs offline
so the simps think the massive aircons running off their input pv(6c rebate kwh)and dropping. and then find they were using peak grid at 29 to 34c instead when the bills come in
Paul
Here in Arizona our electricity provder offered customers $50 to install a “smart” thermostat in their homes. The fine print: it had to be Wifi enabled so the power company could “adjust” if they felt the need to do so.
Nope!
Bullsh**er Bowen is at it again!
As occurs in SA, smart meters allow them to turn off the feed-in when there is too much power being generated from rooftop solar.
Making appliances digital will allow remote control of high energy appliances such as air con
and fridge freezers wonder how long it will take before someone cops a bad delhi belly and sues em for that?
It’s the process of storing energy in a representation or model of the power grid on a supercomputer.
This allows Greens to claim the energy from wind and solar exceeds expectations providing 500% of expected capacity and now powers the world with clean, renewable energy so we no longer need coal except if the computer crashed and needs rebooting, which is never, so there.
I have a link to the paper somewhere or I may have made it up.
It means they can switch off your power when the grid is in danger of a black out! When the grid is unable to handle the load, during high Summer heat, due to the solar and wind power failures, which they are famous for, YOU, and all the rest of us, will have to suffer without power! Kapeesh?
catchy popular phrases are important in propoganda
Since the real goal is to destroy western industrial society, this is just another mechanism to make the process easier.
It is a concept that only a government minister for Climate Change AND Energy could possibly understand.
those stupid expensive smart meters that already forced supply charges up ongoing
for dimwits to feel “special ” to link phones to see power use of appliances
simple common sense and reading the damned appliance labels tells you that
“net zero” and “renewables”: The big lies which are destroying the modern world.
Please. That is “governed” disinformation.
Two of the bigger lies anyway.There are plenty more.
You can rest assured that Granholm doesn’t know her arse from a hole in the ground when it comes to economics (or climate).
Or pretty much anything else.
The hoser (hoserette?) made quite a mess as governor of Michigan (see canadafreepress articles among others)
Would expect nothing less from someone with a BA from UCBerkeley and JD from Harvard Law. Just the credentials you want for a complicated and technical field like energy.
Just another carpetbagger like Hillary.
There are several reasons China dominates in solar.
1) Obama’s waste of taxpayer money to the losers in solar (Solyndra etc.) in the name of “we don’t pick winners” while benefiting our congressional district friends
2) DoE’s focus on blind alleys in all past spending missteps (concentrating solar)
3) Forced labor in western China for half the world’s polysilicon powered by coal plants
4) Rooftop solar lobby groups pushing Dems to keep the forced labor solar products coming
and 5) China is one of the many countries with strategic development goals and finance programs while the U.S. has not had a real one in a generation (podium chatter and DoE waste is not on the same scale)
Chinese slave labor and coal for solar panel manufacturing.
Can’t beat that.
Also steel plants and cement kilns.
And sheet glass.
It’s a trifecta- stolen technology, as always!
Plus no environmentalists – either sane or insane – causing problems. (If any pop up, they tend to join the slave labor pool, if they are VERY lucky.)
They are more likely to become organ donors.
Same people.
Sure. You can still work in a PV factory with one kidney and a third of a liver. It’s only when they need your heart and the other kidney that you have to worry.
Not to mention dominance in rare earth metals.
Plus importing all the materials from China to assemble them here is inconvenient but necessary since ore mining and processing is illegal in modern woke America.
It is more foolish than just energy. Cheap Chinese solar cells use polysilicon. Wind turbine generators require rare earths. China dominates both because they are both very environment polluting. China doesn’t care and doesn’t incur the environmental cleanup costs. There is no way Australia and the US could compete without massive environmental subsidies. Just another green fail.
are a means to try to hide what is going on
Yep.
And many other reasons –
https://www.piratewires.com/p/control-the-metal-control-the-world?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
My experience with solar has only been positive. We built the house in 2008. Two years later we installed 3.6 kWh of cells from Sunpower(US made). The next year we added another row, 2kwh. Since then the whole system, all USA made, has run with no problems. Over a year the energy offset seems to run about 106 kWh per month, with an average usage of 400-600kWh. So it’s been saving us about 20% a month for 12 years.
“Does the Biden Administration Get Why China Dominates Intermittent Wind and Solar Manufacturing”?
Er, no. It doesn’t.
The simplest way to end China’s dominance of wind and solar is to dump both, and go to building South Korean or 1980’s French design nuclear reactors. Texas already has too much wind on it’s net, and California is nearing that level.
Renewables are a failed scheme, and that should be recognized.
California imports electricity from other states.
See “Path 66” and “Pacific DC Intertie”
Agree on the nuclear facilities. Washington has one: Columbia Generating Station. It is usually very stable, but a couple of weeks ago the output was much reduced for about 2 weeks.
BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER
Duh! There is no drought in the PNW this year. My sailing buddy was working overtime on a project that required lowering output. The time to do it is when it is cool and raining not when it is hot a dry and the snow pack is melted.
Note that the BPA is primarily a power transmission and distribution agency. The great bulk of the power it collects, transports, and distributes is generated by other private and public power generation organizations.
Note also that the pie chart on that web page indicates that wind represents 10% of the generation capacity available to the BPA.
I have to believe that the 10% figure is based on nameplate capacity. If the pie chart were based instead on annual gigawatt hours produced by each generation resource, wind would probably be less than 10%. Possibly much less.
National average onshore wind capacity factor is 31%. So 3% not 10%.
all aspects of power electrical need adequate backup
No faith in NuScale and TerraPower? Otherwise, Spot On! We lost power, here in Central Coast Cali, last evening from 7-9:30 PM,. Definitely ‘nearing that level”.
There is a guaranteed way to break China’s wind and solar manufacturing dominance: Get rid of all wind and solar subsidies. It is win-win-win. Our electricity will be reliable again. Win. There will be more land for trees and farms. Win. And there will less government waste. Win. The only ones who lose are communist China with their poor human rights record and greedy selfish grifters and the politicians whom they bought and paid for.
The people getting subsidies will also lose. Whether that is the owner of a rooftop solar installation selling excess power at (high) fixed price or getting subsidies for financing. Or the owners of wind/solar farm getting tax credits or selling (expensive) green power.
Good riddance! And may it happen…
And mandates. Get rid of the subsidies and mandates. Let the market decide.
The only problem with getting rid of the mandates is they are STATE, in general.
But getting rid of the federal subsidies will require the states to pay ALL the costs of meeting the subsidies.
BUT you forgot to put a 50% tariff on all solar from China, wind from Europe.
Rare earths from anywhere outside the US should be taxed at 100% so that the rare earth mining in the US that was run out of business by Chinese dumping can reopen with a stable price structure if the future.
as I remember it the EPA and others forced your RE miner to sell it all off to china decades ago in the 70s clean up ussa superfund debacle
No mandates, no tax credits and no grid priority equals zero new wind and solar. It’s not complicated.
Don’t forget the major corporations that benefit from the investment and production tax credits.
Granholm is clueless about the ways that R&D and profitable manufacturing work. As governor of Michigan she was directly responsible for about 4500 high paying auto jobs moving out of the state, and for creating budget shortfalls that took 3 years to recoup, (the state is required to run on a balanced budget).
The notion that there are hurdles to making any enterprise profitable are totally foreign to progressives and socialists.
In government, balanced budget is a very flexible political term, not an accounting term.
China is literally selling the US the “rope” to hang ourselves with … (that being the Biden energy policy)
Having had Jennifer Granholm as my governor, I can tell you that any agreement she makes is not worth the paper it is written on.
USA taxpayers money….. any other relevant reason?
“US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Australia’s Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen have announced a joint agreement to break China’s dominance of solar and wind manufacture.”
***********
I have noted this before, and I’ll do it again…
Do you Australians know that you are sitting on top of the largest uranium reserves in the world according to Wikipeda? The number two country doesn’t even come close…
List of countries by uranium reserves – Wikipedia
And do you know that you are tied with the U.S. for third in thorium reserves?
List of countries by thorium resources – Wikipedia
Australia is exporting uranium according to the Wiki link below but has never had a nuclear power station on its own soil..
Nuclear power in Australia – Wikipedia
The idiocy of promoting wind and solar (in place of nuclear power) and pretending that wind and solar are a more suitable alternative to displace fossil fuels than nuclear is a fool’s errand. Australia’s uranium and thorium reserves should be the envy of the world, and it is tragic that they do not seem to be. What a waste of time, money and effort.
were well aware. were also aware the mention of nuke gets hysteria maxxed by govt funded ABC in a heartbeat!
and we also have plenty of safer coal and gas we should be using here
and then theres the issue of disposal of nuke waste
as it is we cannot even get a pit in the deserts to bury the medwaste etc in due to greenies and aboriginals
and then theres the issue of disposal of nuke waste
*********
Fourth generation nuclear technology, which is now in its engineering and research and design phase, uses plutonium for initial startup.
https://tinyurl.com/4bnt76hh
Fourth generation nuclear still has a long way to go before we determine if it is commercially viable, but the engineering and research continues.
Big government sad.
The free market, such as it is, would break China’s dominance on solar and wind manufacture. Government wouldn’t have to lift a finger.
Governments would have to kick the failed ism of CAGW addiction. Something any intelligent electorate would have already begun, and any intelligent consumer with anything brought to market in a blanket of sociopolitical fear mongering. But….
This “net zero technology acceleration partnership” …
is accelerating the absurdity of the anti-fossil fuel movement to begin with in respect to actual energy security.
It’s true that reliance on Russian energy was a bad choice. But reliance on wind and solar and the wishful thinking about long-term storage are even worse.
Russia was and IS reliable when its not sanctioned and harrassed BY outsiders like usa. germanys lapdoggery to usa daft ideas and halting nord2 is their own made problem so pay in rubles and stfu and its sweet. providing arms to ukies also is stupid
Does the Biden administration “get” anything? Actually, I think they do.
It’s a common mistake to refer to Biden’s policies as failed. This is incorrect. The policies are doing exactly what they are designed to do. The American people want affordable gasoline. The Biden administration wants expensive gasoline. The American people want reliable, inexpensive electric and natural gas. The Biden administration wants conventional energy sources to be expensive. They want fossil fuels to be in short supply.
Anybody who refers to Biden’s policies as failed is misinformed. They make assumptions that the Biden administration wants what the American people want. Nothing could be further from the truth. Biden’s energy policies are incredibly successful and working as designed.
Spot on! Nobama tried using “We can’t drill our way out of high gas prices” as an excuse to begin
his version of Net Zero but was foiled by drillers. In his third term, he hogtied them first to make sure
they wouldn’t succeed again!
In IT parlance, high energy prices “are a feature, not a bug.”
Also Chinese labor is less expensive than Western labor, because they use slave labor from their gulags
Me thinks slaves are ultimately a false economy
Just look how well it worked out in the USA, not to mention the Roman empire.
The Roman Empire endured for almost 500 years. In that long a run, we are all dead.
Who said anything abut dead? Slavery leads to societal problems, later if not sooner.
But oh! it’s sweet while it lasts.
In addition to the cheaper energy, China is not bound by true costs of labor or by environmental restrictions. And US wind turbine blade manufactures glutted the market for several years, producing more blade sets than could be installed immediately, and were obliged to store (and dispose of waste) while cutting production and materials. Much of the stockpile was damaged in storage and/or quickly obsoleted as systems designed for bigger glam peak production numbers were developed. All the waste and industry collapse driven by fraudulent demand predictions encouraged by promised endless government subsidies.
Just wondering if the Energy Secretary cleared the production increase with the EPA. Like the integrated circuit “chip” industry and steel production, “The Government” drove manufacturing out of the country all in the name of globalism and trade partnerships (iow bribes and kickbacks) in order to deindustrialize the U.S. It will cost 10 times more to build it back, even without the backhanders.
MOST of the end of steel, US manufacturing, etc. was due to China overproducing then dumping, one product after another, to “corner” the world market.
South Korea also helped end much factory production in the US, such a steel pipe for gas.
The idea was that it could be done cheaper abroad, which was true. Also because the US was telling everyone to go to college and you are too good to work with your hands, everyone born and raised in the US thinks they are too good for manual labor of any kind, so go to a housing tract and listen to the workers, almost all speaking Spanish, thus the Democrat industrialist coalition keeping labor prices down.
John McCain, the jack@ss, famously saying Americans won’t do the work that imported labor will, true as long as you hold DOWN the wages paid. Let the market determine what the work is worth and salaries will go up as they did during TRUMPS! first term when he closed down the southern border.
The fact that a salesperson in a climate controlled department store makes more than a laborer digging a ditch in whatever the weather is is ridiculous and only possible when the laborer is an illegal or competing with an illegal for the job…
wrong on the illegals bit. as a lowerpaid worker in manual labour/trades all my life producing high value goods for a pittance in pay and lousy conditions in Aus for 30 yrs or so. my wages were always less than the bimbo with fakenails doing sfa in the office. even after skilling up to electronic assembly testing etc i STILL got paid less than i did for cleaning toilets!!
This might have a lot to do with China’s domination of “renewable” energy technology and manufacturing –
https://www.piratewires.com/p/control-the-metal-control-the-world?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
but they do provide another easy target for Chinese tech spies.
There are also low labour costs and an artificially low exchange rate.
China makes a whole lot of money selling these, but since Chinese think in the long term, what’s the long-term benefit? Their customers, the US, will have intermittent power problems. This will weaken the US in every way without the need for war. Good Strategy.
It isn’t just energy, they will bury us with cheaper rare earths and other material costs. We’re done and redone on this file.
In addition to lower energy costs made possible by burning coal without U.S.-style environmental regulations, let’s not forget the immense cost-savings available to Chinese manufacturers thanks to slave labor. Presto! Your two biggest cost factors cut down to size, just like that!
Vowing to “break China’s dominance” is foolish bravado from fatuous officials with careers in foolishness who’ve never done anything useful in their lives.
“Those agreements” are not intended to make Western “clean” energy (government cronies) competitive, they are intended to funnel even more money from the productive economy to their parasite friends. They’ve never cared before that their products can’t compete with cheap energy, slave labor and polluting mines, and they aren’t about to start now.
Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
seeing as chinas going to drop bans on aussie coal to grab more thats funny!
we have one aluminium smelter in Vic Alcoa and its battling to stay in biz due to power outages ruining melts and repairs for that etc govt subsidies to bribe them not to shut n go to china or elsewhere. and the greentards moaning the local roos are having aluminium toxicity from eating the local grass near it
shoot the roos or fence em out ffs!
while we have a decent amount of Bauxite setting up enough plant to make process etc is pie in sky without govt support and the greentards wont allow that let alone more mines etc wont even bother with the silica and silver and the rest issues. dont like china having a monopoly? STOP supporting and buying pv and wrecking our grids at the same time
win win all round;-)
please remember that Chris Bowen is a goose. In the last Labor government Bowen was the Immigration Minister and on his watch welcomed 50000 boat arrivals and counted at least 1280 drownings in the attempt. He was tthe shadow treasurer who dreampt up several proposals to attack the self funded retirees and famously said just before the election “if you don’t like our policies don’t vote for us”. So they didn’t and Labor lost the unloseable election. If Bowen is promoting anything run a million miles because it will fail. He said recently that nuclear energy was too expensive just before he advocated firming the grid with 7500 big batteries that should keep us going for a few hours during a week long wind drought. He is pig ignorant. Sorry, pigs are smart. Bowen is just dumb.