From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
.A new report from the IEA shows just how much China dominates the Solar PV industry:
Let’s look at some of the charts.
The first set show how far China’s dominance has increased since 2010, particularly on wafers and polysilicon, the early stages of the manufacturing stage:
And frighteningly that dominance is expected to continue growing:
China’s dominance is built on lower costs, the result of low electricity costs, lack of environmental standards and what amounts to slave labour. It is fundamentally clear that the West cannot compete on China’s terms, leaving the dilemma of strategic overdependence on China or much higher solar panel costs.
China dominates solar by selling crappy panels made by slave labor that last less than half as long as promised and produce less energy than promised
By February of the coming year people in the west will reach point that the stupid politicians will have to abandon all this CC (climate cr*p) or face popular uprising and unrest. I have a pretty good idea what the choice of governing cowards is going to be.
dreamer
When they can find more terrorists under every rock they turn over, they have no end of excuses to do whatever it takes to maintain power.
Instead of raiding Mar-a-Lago, they should be raiding the USA biological labs at home and overseas.
https://www.jeffsachs.org/interviewsandmedia/2wts4jr6lccy9gxy9pdg99lzf2ntjn
They are not running for President in 2024
Ah, Bastille Day is coming!
Had to replace 2 rooms of dry wall after 3 years because they had disintegrated and we weren’t told they came from China.
Oh yeah. Chinese drywall was a big scandal, marlene. What didn’t fall apart contained toxic materials.
Here’s a link to a refresher on the mess if anyone wants to review that problem. If anyone is buying a home built in the early 2000s, you might want to click on the link.
Learn About Chinese Drywall & It’s Dangers to You & Your Home (homeinspectionsfortworthtx.com)
But non-working panels give off the same good green virtue signal feelings as new ones. It’s the distracted liberal thought that counts.
OMG! You just gave me an idea, Resource Guy.
If you live in a neighborhood with a bunch of hypocritical virtue signaling loonies and are tired of hearing about saving the planet, buy one or two sheets of plywood, cut them in solar panel-size squares, paint them to look like solar panels, and use a few simple mounts to attach them to your roof.
Then go back to barbecuing your whole brisket or racks of ribs on your wood or charcoal smoker grill in relative peace and quiet.
😁
Except the real solar panels are cheaper than the plywood…
@Capn’ Mike – Ouch! Yes. A sheet of plywood is in nosebleed territory now.
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@David Walker – Tempting… tempting… but we only have 3 libs, 1 solar installation,** and zero EVs in our 42-house neighborhood. Everyone else is pretty much on board with traditional American values.
**It’s a near perfect home roof installation other than we are at 43 degrees North. No shade, faces due South. and the roof is pitched a bit over 30 degrees. I think payback will be [guessing] about 50% longer than calculated.
The guy is an Electrical Engineer, so I know he’s done the math. Even if it doesn’t perform up to expectations, if we start getting rolling blackouts or 2, 5, or 2-week outages due to the Green Nude Eel, then he is definitely ahead of the game.
I don’t know if he has battery backup, though.
“If you live in a neighborhood with a bunch of hypocritical virtue signaling loonies and are tired of hearing about saving the planet…”
Buy an air rifle?
Yes, like so much of the junk imported from China. We can only hope that their military equipment is as shoddy as the rest of the things they produce,
‘We can only hope that their military equipment is as shoddy as the rest of the things they produce.’
Hope is not a strategy. As for their military equipment, it looks an awful lot like ours. What a coincidence!
Looks can be deceiving. Like Russia equipment it’s all propaganda. Anyone that believes China’s new “stealth” fighters are competitive with the F22 or F35 is naive. Just copying …. even if you steal all the specifications …. doesn’t make them the real thing. It takes decades to make everything work as intended. Just like it took the US decades to go from first build to production with aircraft since the 1950’s.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy
I wonder how this might apply when the robotic-looking Chinese military have to actually fight and things do not go according to their plan/expectation.
Will they have the capacity at all levels, grunt to general, to alter their tactics on the fly?
“China’s dominance is built on lower costs, the result of low electricity costs, lack of environmental standards and what amounts to slave labour. It is fundamentally clear that the West cannot compete on China’s terms, leaving the dilemma of strategic overdependence on China or much higher solar panel costs.”
It seems no one om the world should buy solar panels.
It seems the only nation which really needs solar panels is China.
Wouldn’t wonderful if China used it’s own solar panels instead burning 4 million tons
of coal every year which causes so much pollution it kills the Chinese people?
It is doubtful that their coal use kills many of their people, rather the opposite is likely.
But their coal mining might
isn’t it 4 [or 5] Billion tonnes a year?
Auto
Since a solar panel reduces CO2 emissions wherever it’s deployed, just stop buying them and let China use them instead of coal-fueled power plants.
In the UK, it is government policy to allow solar farms to be built on the back of Chinese slave labour. To save the planet you have to be ruthless with Uyghur Muslims.
Is anyone tracking the mass graves or is that out of green bounds also?
This is the productivity record of Weather-Dependent power generation in Europe and the UK for the last 10 years: less than 20% overall.
https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/3-graphs-say-it-all-for-renewables/
Would anyone sane buy a car costing 7 – 24 times the normal price that only works one day in five, when you never know which day that might be ? And then insist that its technology is used to power the whole economy.
“Would anyone sane buy a car costing 7 – 24 times the normal price that only works one day in five, when you never know which day that might be ? And then insist that its technology is used to power the whole economy. ”
Apparently so.
Thanks for the great post. Bookmarked!
While offshore wind looks like the “winner”, that “winning” comes at a high
cost- 24x– as illustrated in another graph from your post. Your post on the
2021 wind drought is also well done. A 34-day “dead spot” in the UK was
from 8/19-9/21. UK solar was only ~10% of installed capacity then, too.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/WIND
Your numbers are only the tip of the iceberg as you don’t get into the cost of
storage- mostly via battery. It’s criminal how the leaders are intentionally destroying their own people. Thanks again!
WUWT-
The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.
https://www.cfact.org/2022/01/19/unreliability-makes-solar-power-impossibly-expensive/
“China’s dominance is built on lower costs, the result of low electricity costs, lack of environmental standards and what amounts to slave labour.”.
China’s electricity costs are lower because (a) the Chinese use coal-fired power, and (b) we use their solar panels for our power. We in the west cut our use of coal fired power because we think it’s bad for the planet, but we buy China’s solar panels knowing full well that they use just as much coal to make them as we would if we made them ourselves. So we are making China stronger and ourselves weaker by transferring industry, jobs and money to China – a country that will attack us as soon as they feel strong enough. How brain-dead suicidally stupid can we get?
Ask Nancy Pelosi if she’s going to support and vote for the new “climate bill” masquerading as an inflation bill, when it subsidizes solar farms and jobs in China, when that country just threatened to blow her plane out of the sky for visiting Taiwan.
Of course she will.
Pelosi’s son (Hunter 2.0) accompanied her on this trip. He’s financially tied to companies involved in solar cell production and Lithium mining https://www.foxnews.com/media/jesse-watters-paul-pelosi-jr-alleged-shady-business-dealings
Did not know about Jr. Thanks. Proves the point, though – follow the money. All that money wasted for no benefit but to the connected.
Yep, indeed: just when you start to think China might do something to help the West!
China is now adopting the role of providing the addicted political west, with the drugs it craves. Those drugs do not come in the form of a substance to be consumed personally. The drugs come in the form of useless so called environmental products.
You can look at any manufacturing sector and see China dominates, or is in the process of dominating it.
The agents operating in the West promoting Chinese hegemony may or may not know their place in the political game they are involved in. The agencies now dominating globally are given inclusive names that appear benign. The United Nations (UN) who could argue against such a noble objective? The World Economic Forum (WEF) again that collective ambition to speak economically as one for the whole world, how wonderful an idea it is? The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and so on. That weaving in of interconnected interests, across the globe has become essential for credibility, it goes on and on. Green Peace, IPCC, WWF, the pan world list is almost endless. All have grand ambitions, they claim to want to make things, better.
How is that collective effort working out?
The one nation that is clearly being made stronger (the jury is out on whether it’s better) is China.
We now have the incredible situation before us where the West has energy reserves sufficient to meet its needs and thus stop runaway inflation but are legally unable to act, We are being blocked from essential energy extraction that would reduce costs at the pumps by our own elected politicians? They are now determined to prevent easy access to energy of any sort?
Why?
The only nation enjoying the West’s self destruction is China.
Why are our political class so determined to see China rise? They are collectively enacting policy after policy that reduces the West’s ability to maintain its core strengths and independence?
You have to conclude the Long March Through the Institutions as demanded by the Marxists in the 1930s as a generations long policy to stop capitalism has been very successfully implemented.
Where do we go from here?
Off topic and i humbly apologise , but from yesterday evening , when I first started to read this post, to this morning (UK times) the ENSO meter alongside has dropped considerably . Could someone with the relevant knowledge tell us what that means , because it had been moving up .Is this an instrumental error?
Seven years ago; same day of year before a significant El Nino:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2015/08/08/1200Z/ocean/primary/waves/overlay=sea_surface_temp_anomaly/orthographic=-153.76,-7.88,388/loc=-149.997,-0.242
Today at same location:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2022/08/08/1200Z/ocean/primary/waves/overlay=sea_surface_temp_anomaly/orthographic=-153.76,-7.88,388/loc=-149.997,-0.242
Certainly appears to be still in La Nina mode.
Earth is 7700km further from the sun in 2022 than average. In 2015 it was 7000km closer to the sun.
http://www.astropixels.com/ephemeris/perap/perap2001.html
This is not the primary factor in the ENSO switch, which is most likely salinity, but the proximity to the sun increases the likelihood.
The attached chart is the Nino34 region temperature that is the basis for the ENSO gauge. You can see how it changers with the 11 year cycle of the orbital shift due to Jupiter’s pull on the sun and Earth. The 2015/16 El Nino coincided with the peak in the 11 year cycle. The 1998 El Nino was toward the end of a cycle. The timing of ENSO is not directly linked but the underlying moving average does make a difference to ENSO.
The overriding objective in the guilt-ridden West is to get emissions down as low as possible. China not only has domination through its Road and Belt, it also dominates manufacturing with its leeway as a ‘developing’ nation.
We hear an awful lot about ‘green jobs‘. Could manufacturing wind turbines count as green jobs? In these Orwellian times anything can mean anything. There will of course be a niche for the solar panel cleaner and the insulation installer… nobody has the money to ditch their superior gas boiler, and it doesn’t look like they will, either.
“Local manufacturing firm BiFab, located just miles from the enormous Seagreen offshore wind project, has not been awarded any of the work on the expensive turbines for Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), with 84 of 114 required being awarded to a Chinese yard and 30 to a firm based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“We are extremely disappointed that the developers have chosen to exclude Scottish yards from any fabrication contracts,” said DF Barnes, which owns BiFab along with the Scottish Government, in comments reported by The Press and Journal.”
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/09/19/so-much-for-green-jobs-scottish-turbine-manufacturing-work-goes-to-communist-china/
The Scottish government (aka woke central) won’t even give so-called green jobs to its own yards and people. That would push up those pesky emissions….
“The Scottish government has again missed its target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Figures for 2019 show they fell 51.5% against the baseline, well short of the 55% target.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-57482228
The population? It’s ~5 million. You have to be exceedingly delusional to believe they make any difference.
“The overriding objective in the guilt-ridden West”
It’s more like “stupid-ridden”.
FACEBOOK: “Your message couldn’t be sent because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive.” So all truth about China is now censored on FB. Other articles about China on other sites are also censored by China. Biden and China, together again…
Slave labor and coal for energy
Can’t beat that !
Don’t look and don’t tell much like the local Germans living next to the death camps in Germany.
That’s unfair.
“It is very easy to claim that everyone should have known what would happen once Fascism came to power. But such an approach is ahistorical. Nazism was an unprecedented phenomenon……..There was no precedent in recent European history for the murderous character of German National Socialism and for this reason most contemporaries were caught unprepared.”
Walter Laqueur ‘The Terrible Secret’
I would like to add the recommendation to watch “The Wave” (1981), an American TV-movie based on the Third Wave experiment, in which a teacher is confronted with the same comment by his pupils and being forced to teach a class on autocracy. A must see is the German version “Die Welle” (2008).
Maybe there’s a parallel to discover about how we one day will ask ourselfs how we all became CO2-witnesses and climate clerks while millions of people have been put in the dark and starving.
Add in rare earths for electronics also in the region….
‘The Sacrifice Zone’: Myanmar bears cost of green energy – ABC News (go.com)
My neighbour recently opined within my earshot:
“Solar works” he says.
My reply:
“Yes it does and very well too. It works to spearhead a massive transfer of Western currencies to China.”
It’s not all beer and skittles for the Chinese leadership in weather dependent generation-
Chinese green ambitions’ dirty side: Beijing faces recycling challenge as millions of wind turbines and solar panels near retirement (msn.com)
Many of Europe’s wind farms are approaching the ends of their life too.
DAve,
I am sure you’re right.
MSN, as reported, less so.
China will fling the detritus into Landfill.
Africa is a big continent ….
Auto.
Coal fired power plants and slave labor are an unbeatable combination.
Oil made us beholden to the Saudis and the Russians. “Renewables” will change our masters not our fates.
The French are experts at exploiting these situations with deals under the radar. They may have a lot of other EU member state competition this time though. Row well and live you slaves of the UK/EU greens.
Be sure and hide the contraband slave-made panels in the wood pellet shipments to the UK.
China Joe and every other democrat knows this. That’s why they give the new tax credits to China. More kickbacks for them.
You mean that it IS all just a Chinese scam? Who said that, I wonder?
I am very comfortable conceading leadership in solar PV and ping pong to China.
Based on 30 years of overservation, the only purpose of solar is to tell other people that they have solar.
I have been sailing and camping for 50 years. Full time since retiring. I run into a lot of wanna bees. First thing they tell me is about the solar they are going to use.
That tells me they will never make it to full time out in the enviropment or when they do a bear will eat them. Self proclaimed ‘enviromentalist’ are stragely ignorant of the natural enviroment and making electricty.
When camping I either maximize heat gain from the sun so I need less heat at night or park in the shade so I do not need air conditioning during the day. Solar is not practical for an RV air conditioning system based on the available area.
I have been banned on some RV web sites for calling solar a scam. That is called free speach.
I don’t know where to file this, but I think it goes here:
Soon we will be in the same fix with China as Europe is with Russia. Man humanity is stupid.
I’m not losing sleep over Chinese “dominance in solar”. They have a state managed economy which, without a real price system, is inherently unproductive. I’d bet that the Chinese are losing money on every solar cell they make. For years, they have been financing their operation on borrowed money. Their debt to GDP ratio is worse than ours. When interest rate rise their costs will increase even more. I doubt that China will last 10 years before complete economic collapse.
Western economists tend to believe that state managed economies are successful because a dictator can react quickly to market changes. As late as 1980, Paul Samuelson, who wrote the Economics 101 textbook that every college used for 40 years, predicted that the Soviet Union’s GDP would exceed that of the US by the year 2000. We’re seeing a repeat of this with characters like Larry Fink of Blackrock praising China and saying we should be more like the Chinese.
This is the current number of sunspots. You can see that it has dropped again after a brief peak. Interestingly, the number of sunspots in the solar northern and southern hemispheres is developing synchronously, unlike in the 24th solar cycle.
could have been the USA…