Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determined to perpetuate that crisis, if necessary by cutting off US imports of energy production infrastructure themselves now that the foreigners won't do it for them anymore.
The article vastly understates the rapidity of the change. It projects 3 TW of new renewable generation capacity in China over the next decade (02026-02036, I suppose), attributing that to an unpublished report from a consultancy that seems to protect its projections from criticism with an NDA. Given that the PRC installed 373 GW in renewable generation capacity last year (https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/28/cont...) this seems like an implausibly low figure; linear extrapolation of installing that same amount every year would give us 3.7 TW installed over that period. But in fact it has been growing exponentially, so 20 TW of added capacity over the next decade seems like a more likely ballpark.
That's nameplate capacity, so it's closer to 4 TW of actual energy generation.
Of course, most of said solar and battery tech was originally developed by Americans; chinese bought old patents, bought companies out of bankruptcy, and threw obscene amounts of state capital at developing it further. and now we're stuck with crap like CATL owning a huge amount of the advanced battery market. The implication that this is "just what the market decided" and that we must concede to the artificial scenario beijing has constructed, likely with the express intent of gaining leverage over more nations, is ridiculous.
Instead, we should mass-invalidate every single chinese-owned patent. She built her economy on stealing ours anyhow. Do it ourselves, or rely on allied/subordinate nations for manufacturing.
I strongly disagree with both your master-race theory of technical innovation and your imperialist rhetoric. Americans, and in particular people from the US, did contribute greatly to solar and battery technological innovation. But a great deal of it was carried out outside the US, or inside the US by non-Americans, and in particular by Chinese grad students at US universities. Technological and scientific progress is inherently an international effort on behalf of all of humanity.
In terms of bringing utility-scale battery storage and PV energy production to mass production, US elites have basically opted not to participate. Unfortunately I expect that situation to continue.
Withdrawing international intellectual-property monopolies en masse is an interesting suggestion; I think it would probably promote progress, in particular because it would free other countries around the world to do the same with US patents and copyrights, which have been among the most significant obstacles to progress and even simple preservation of knowledge.
beijing has a consistent policy of subsidizing and dumping to gain dominance of key industries. metals, energy, etc. they are surely aware of the security implications of this. it seems to be their response to the mutually assured destruction of nuclear weapons: since those are no longer usable, create a new asymmetric situation where china can install herself as international dictator without or in addition to military force.
We can't afford not to respond. If we are unwilling to go to war, we'd have to concede to being china's bitch, which is a worse option than war.
Importing solar panels with no means to repair, replace, and resupply would absolutely make things worse; it'd increase dependence on a technology over which we lack control.
This isn't "imperialist" rhetoric, I'm quite plainly speaking in terms of maintaining our own autonomy and independence, not in terms of coercing others.
I don't think you can credit technology from foreign grad students at American universities or companies to those foreign countries. Doubly so since said chinese grad students have a long track record of facilitating the IP theft we're discussing.
Withdrawing would not free other countries to do so; the core difference here is china is a bad actor who exploits and steals IP. not to mention we could get away with this because we have a military of a certain size; smaller countries probably could not.
Regardless of whether we produce domestically, there's no particular reason why we can't work with other cheap nations within our sphere of influence (probably latam) to handle production.
Importing now does not increase security.
Edit: one thing the Trump-Vance administration has done is tear through the tissue-paper screen of "rules based international order" rhetoric, exposing to plain view that we live in a world of great powers and international anarchy. As we have always done, but somehow allowed ourselves to believe naive falsehoods.
Uhh they don’t last forever. So yeah. They can be controlled like oil if you are unable to make or source replacements.
It's not like being dependent on Saudi Arabia to supply oil. If China cuts us off from new solar panels, the solar panels we already have continue to provide electricity. It would only slow the rate of deployment, which we're already doing to ourselves by imposing a tariff on solar panel imports.
Alternatively, one could interpret "subordinate" to be one of the COFA[1] nations, for example (not saying I read it that way, but if this were a debate class and I was assigned to make the argument that these states are subordinates of the US, I probably could).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_of_Free_Association
A large part of the German's military initiatives in WW2 were about obtaining access to oil, and the most successful Allied initiatives were about cutting off that oil.
We shoudln't let China overproduce and dump excess solar productions in its own attempts to control the market. We're trying to not repeat the energy dependence on unfriendly foreign powers. We don't want the Chinese Solar Embargo of 2026.
I think that this misreads how the Chinese solar industry works. It's one of the less government-controlled industries in China. It's fiercely competitive, which leads to low prices, rapid change, and periodic bankruptcies. Chinese-made solar panels became popular for the same reason their T-shirts and microwave ovens became popular: acceptable quality offered at unbeatable prices.
I also think that there's low risk of lock-in from buying Chinese solar products now. Solar panels have a typical operating lifetime about equivalent to 5 years at 100% of rated power. In practice this means something more like 20 years in a solar farm in a very sunny climate or 35 years in a cloudy climate. The steady state replacement rate to maintain a nation's solar capacity is therefore about 3%-5% of the initial installation rate. If China prohibited solar panel exports, Western countries could maintain existing solar farm capacity with only tiny outside-of-China solar manufacturing capacity. There would be plenty of time for not-China countries to determine if the embargo were temporary or persistent before investing in more expensive but more dependable domestic factories.
It's not lock-in, it's price competitiveness of locally produced solar. If Chinese solar is half price, domestic industry won't exist. If relations with China further deteriorate, they may restrict access. If there was a war we'd be out a major source of energy production/growth.
Currently the US is expected to manufacture solar modules at least equal to solar installs last year.
Being able to maintain production if there was an embargo, we're seeing something like a 20% year over year growth of total installed solar.
Promoting domestic PV panel production would be reasonable, but that's not what current US industrial policy is aimed at. Instead it's trying to resuscitate fossil fuels, like Tinkerbell, through sheer force of belief.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/china-solar-ener...
This is basically nonsense. Chinese solar panels are cheap because they are produced efficiently, with orders of magnitude less materials and energy than were required in 02012, when the US started imposing "anti-dumping" tariffs on them.
I've read many of the US Department of Commerce filings on the topic attempting to argue that the current prices are unfairly subsidized. The arguments are embarrassingly bad, arguing over things like what the fair price of solar glass should be, or whether the fair price of the labor of Chinese solar panel assembly workers should be determined by comparing to Malaysian electronics assembly labor or Romanian electronics assembly labor. (They settled on Turkish labor.)
Even when resorting to such absurd arguments, the countervailing tariffs the DoC decided it could justify were only in the range of 10-15%:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14...
Finding the original filings in these cases, spanning 13 years at this point, took a fair bit of digging, but it was very eye-opening. See for example https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3... and Barcode:4426784-02 C-570-011 (not linkable by any URL).
But, basically, you have to ask, if subsidies are the reason Chinese solar module prices today are lower than module prices were in 02012, when they cost €0.64 per peak watt instead of today's €0.110, does that mean that Chinese taxpayers are paying 82% of the cost of installing solar panels around the world? China is just exporting €100 billion a year of its tax revenues in the form of solar panels, with the intent of at some point raising the prices to above where they were in 02012, say €0.75 per peak watt? When should we expect that other shoe to drop?
Because the solar panel industries in other nations are pretty thoroughly destroyed, except for those created by Chinese companies seeking ways around US tariffs.
It just isn't a plausible story, even if it is being promoted by the same newspaper that promoted the story of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" to justify invading Iraq.
The NYT article you linked talked about them using cheap(polluting) coal power and cheap(slave labor) mineral inputs.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-markets/texas-bi...
I am sure businesses that follow the administration's wishes will get government contracts, tax rebates, tariff exceptions, and other favorable treatment. I am not worried, the vast majority of businesses will learn within a few months that it is financially profitable to bend the knee.
edit: removed pronoun
Regulation in territories where it is harder for corporations to buy politicians seems to be far more successful at driving improvements.
We are in an era where clean energy is the cheapest energy, and the biggest impediment to the transition is merely being allowed to put the energy on the grid. Go around the country, and the queue to get interconnected to the grid is one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Another huge stumbling block is the procedure for acquiring new electricity generation assets, typically done through IRPs for five years out, based on out-dated data. This is the "standard" regulatory regime in the US, though its highly fractured and there are many many variations.
In this highly "regulated" environment, the corporations have already completely captured the market, and have often bribed the Public Utility Commissions to achieve their own goals.
Deregulation in Texas means less corporate capture, more of a chance for smaller startups to deploy, and a faster energy transition now that the cheapest technology is clean technology.
Texas is an energy-only market right now (payments only for kWh delivered), but adding a capacity market could help (payments for ensuring the ability to deliver electricity), and capacity markets are common in other energy markets around the US. And another thing that would have helped even more clearly is cleaning house at the ISO that didn't follow any of the guidelines from the massive outage from nuclear and gas that happened more than a decade ago. But the ISO failing to do what it's supposed to do is the regulators not doing their job. Regulators regulating what they have the power to do is clearly important in any system.
Don't really trust something advocating for deregulated energy markets to not mention the elephant in the room.
The current energy deregulation in the EU involves forcing utilities to trade electricity in a spot market, that treats the on-demand production of conventional power plants and the random and unpredictable production of solar and wind, as if it's completely equivalent. Of course, that's a fairly effective way to promote solar, as it's far more intrusive than conventional renewable mandates.
As far as I can see, "deregulation" means, "we regulate far more aggressively than before, but there's now a market in there where Wall Street types can make money".
The California case also forced utilities to trade electricity in a spot market. These markets always seem oriented towards purchasing power rather than capacity, which strikes me as odd. Power companies need committed capacity, because they need to have reserves of power. Sure, buying electricity that no one else is using makes sense, but because demand is comparatively inelastic, it's just crazy to have that be how companies ensure they have sufficient capacity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California...
Deregulating an industry to achieve a specific goal is certainly one approach.
In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized.
I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government can no longer control the market due to being 'too big too fail' and because it gave all control away.
> Deregulated markets, which might be better described as “differently regulated” markets, separate these concerns. Independent power producers (generators) build and sell electricity wholesale to Retail Electric Providers (REPs), who sell to households, while utilities manage the transmission and infrastructure.
On the face of it this makes sense to me. Deregulation doesn't mean there are no regulations at all. It means we split up a monolithic entity into different parts that can each be subject to competitive forces and be regulated differently.
Companies want to maximize profit and minimize cost, while customers want as much as possible for the lowest price.
Public goods and common goods need artificial markets created by regulatory frameworks.
IMHO, you can't have markets without regulations, and the markets that work best are those in high-trust societies, and that high-trust usually comes form a solid regulatory structure (i.e. laws).
This is why saying "deregulation is bad" is just as incoherent as saying "regulations are bad." We need to move beyond that sort of fallacious dichotomy.
Neither public services nor private enterprise is a silver bullet to everything.
They pivot or they slowly die.
It just takes way longer to reach market equilibrium than free-market advocates claim. And by way longer, I mean years or even decades rather than months or weeks, which means a lot of suffering or externalities during the transitional period.
Healthcare was once deregulated in the U.S. And it was fine. And it would be again if we deregulated healthcare, but it would take more than a decade and nobody has the stomach for that. (And nobody has yet made a compelling case to demonstrate that a deregulated healthcare system would be a sufficient improvement over what we have now to justify the suffering that the changeover would cause.)
It doesn't clearly tie the choice of business model to the way the businesses are regulated, so it fails to support the claim that regulation is the cause of the lack of solar adoption. The examples it uses to make its case, the TVA and the state of Texas, are also not great.
The TVA is owned by the government. So the question of their pivot to solar power is more of a political question than an economic one. Is there any political will to spend tax dollars pivoting the TVA away from nuclear and hydro sources to solar? Which politicians support/reject the policy and why?
Texas is also not a great example given the recent tragedies arguably resulting from their lack of regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
In-line with other comments, Enron is a classic case-study of the consequences of allowing free markets unfettered control over essential infrastructure.
> TVA benefits from existing capex in large nuclear and hydro plants, enjoys low rates, and has little incentive to change.
So apparently TVA has already invested in large nuclear and hydro and doesn't need more power. It's not about to build more solar so that it can shut down its nuclear or hydro plants. No business will cannibalize itself like this. It will have to a different economic entity.
> Regulated utilities can also sign PPAs, but the lengthy and complex regulatory approvals make the process so cumbersome that few investors or developers actually pursue this option.
Regulated entities can theoretically do this, but they are cumbersome so they don't.
The article also mentions the tragedy of the 2021 crisis, along with the 2020 blackouts in California; the article says it's a matter of extreme weather, not the failure of a specific type of energy market.
> I'm not read into the details of PPA regulations. There may be a good point there about how some/all of them are too onerous which de-incentivizes change. idk.
> ensuring that companies we entrust with providing critical infrastructure are resilient to extreme weather is a matter of regulation. I think that the Texas and California examples were both specific instances of regulatory failures regardless of their ambient culture of regulation.
The energy crisis that happened in EU demonstrated to me that citizens are not willing to have a free market for the energy grid. When a single month cost as much as a whole year, and companies are unable to fulfill contracts or have to shut down, then their anger is not directed at the commercial companies in charge of solar, wind or other type of energy plants. It is directed towards the government for failing to provide basic function of society, which apparently include a reasonable priced electricity.
Absolute numbers are not the right metric when one of the states doesn't care about efficiency and decides to generate more and more electricity. Then absolute number are huge but percentages of renewal are very low.
It looks into the numbers for the Texas renewable buildout, and there's a very important caveat: the amount of renewables you build is not the relevant metric. Emission reduction is. And Texas does not succeed there.
Power in California is from the Western Interconnect, which is regulated by WECC.
Power on the Western Interconnect is only 8.7% solar and 10.4% wind.[0]
Texas in the same year was 7% solar and 24% wind.[1]
[0] https://wecc-spdp-weccgeo.hub.arcgis.com/pages/power-generat...
[1] Annoyingly the data is in an excel spreadsheet in a zip file https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/03/10/FuelMixReport_Pr...
Are you saying they would have released less CO2 had they installed natural gas power plants instead?
Because that's the point of this article isn't it? To follow Texas policies, not California's, by pointing to absolute numbers of renewables.
If they looked at absolute numbers on coal and gas they'd look worse.
The only thing that could move this along faster is to shut down fully running and functional fossil fuel facilities, which means that the huge capital assets are stranded and a big loss to the people who paid for them.
There, Texas's approach of private investors bearing the cost of that poor investment will fare much better than California's approach of letting the utility bill customers for their poor decisions. (I say this as a Californian absolutely INFURIATED at our toothless public utility commission allowing six whole rate increases in the past year, making electricity for a heat pumpfar more expensive than burning gas for heating, and making charging an EV about the same cost as fueling gas car, instead of much cheaper.)
If we're talking about the impact of a particular tech, choosing the proper baseline is important, otherwise it's easy to reach fallacious results in counterfactual reasoning.
Emission reduction versus what? Per-capita emissions reductions? Per-kWh emissions reductions? Compared to whose usage?
Plotting total emission and saying "we've failed!" actually hides a lot of what's going on, it's only one aspect, and increased population can hide that overall emissions are trending in the right way.
The price competitive producers were all stable fossil fuels, natural gas and coal.
They failed to take into account unreliable low cost producers forcing reliable but marginally more expensive producers out of the market.
If solar/wind producers had to guarantee power 24x7 at fixed rates the cost would vastly exceed natural gas costs.
They just need to change the contract requirements to match reality.
Absent turning the Texas energy market into a more rational design (I was part of the energy market during dereg, these failures were predicted by our energy economists at the time), the state should mandate weatherization for wind generation at a minimum, and look into grid-scale battery requirements as prices fall and technologies mature.
Solar and wind are fantastic opportunistic power generators that work well together and should be a significant part of any grid's energy mix going forward, but the state needs to act like every other power market and pay for spinning fossil fuel capacity for shoulder and peak demand. Picking energy mix winners and losers is just political meddling in what was supposed to be a free market environment.
and in process lower your household energy need
BY INCREASING comfort.
BREEAM / Passive house.... In passive house in norway (alaska of europe) you can be 3 days without electricity(or gas or any other heating medium) and in coldest of cold days you do not need to put sweater on, because it is still comfortable, heat is not escaping as fast.
so there is deregulation of market and there is not educated customer + educated regulation which bankrupts your company if you build trash like they mostly build in USA. so it is not only energy, there are other regulation not in sync with reality/human nature.
and by lowering your household energy needs(by increasing comfort), higher ratio of renewables can be used cheaply or even onsite/roof.
and your energy requirement can be manipulated more in time i.e. you can heat house few degrees more few days in advance. after you see on tv that next few days will be cloudy/stormy/ hurricane/frost... or just make app do that for you
or you can heat your hot water at noon where electricity prices are almost 0$
so less effort providing energy for household is, more effort can be put into providing energy for business
build better houses, use saving in energy to buy more things. hard capitalism. but no that is bad. :)
socialism inside of a energy market is good for people raised in capitalism. makes no sense to me.
lowering households energy need 100% in instant is like providing 25% more energy generation for everything else.
I think Texas' market right now is completely disproving that point. The amount of batteries being deployed everywhere are showing that storing solar/wind for a fraction of the day is going to be a lot cheaper than having tons of gas.
In China, the government has the goal of deploying as much energy as possible as cheaply and fast as possible, and promoting their own industries too. Which means tons and tons and tons of renewables.
While (centralized, government) industrial policy has played a key role in making its renewable energy sector so utterly dominant, the sector thus created is more decentralized and privatized than in even the US.
China's share of of electricity production from coal is at 60% as of 2023[1] compared to 16% for the US[2]. That's down from 80% in 2005. It currently generates 35% of its electricity from renewable sources as of 2023 compared to 41% in the US. The US has been replacing coal with gas - gas was 19% in 2005 and 42% in 2023.
China first exceeded the US's annual carbon emissions in 2006 with both outputting about 6 billion tons. Since then the US has declined to a bit under 5 billion tons in 2023 while China has doubled to a bit under 12 billion tons[3] making it by far the largest emitter in notional terms per year.
While the Western world's carbon emissions have been in decline for years (with the US still the highest ex-China), China and India's emissions continue to climb at significant rates. It's true that China is building enormous amounts of renewable energy, but that can be further generalized to China is building enormous amounts of energy production across all sources, dirty and clean.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
The argument was always that the labor and regulations cost too much but the labor abuse and pollution are costing us more.
If we stopped buying shit we don't need, they could easily turn off a good portion of their coal powered electricity plants if they wanted.
If they wanted. China has a policy of overproduction, especially in raw materials like steel. While the US subsidizes consumption, China subsidizes production. It is not clear they would elect to scale back (and take the economic hit) even if Western consumers decided to voluntarily cut back (which also seems unlikely).
None of this serves anyone but the ruling class and deep state. War with China is going to be one that the US loses.
At the same time, long term investments into fossil fuels and atomic energy are forbidden!
Saying "deregulated" energy markets drive solar, is another level of evil. It is logic that drove dependency on Russian natural gas!
but people seem to fall in trap of not thinking about user/customer.
if pv is so cheap that it can pay itself in 6-7 years, by customer lowering his draw from grid drastically most of the time, whole energy transition will not be so painful for other participants of market. wast majority of thinking is going to energy providers, not a lot of thinking is going to changing customers habits ( of which most energy intense can be automated and either spread out or concentrated towards time when energy is cheap - you know sun will be shining tomorrow or day after, renewables are not as unpredictable)
customers and provider can cooperate.
and so " In EU renewable are not competitive.." for whom? for energy providers ? Or for customer which can easily and cheaply lower his energy draw from grid by 70% most of year by installing solar pv hot water heater + heatpumpin for 7 months of cooling his house from pv? even before installing batteries? (just electric hot water heater)
