Exactly: the number of green-energy jobs is growing massively in the States thanks to the availability of affordable solar cells. It sounds lovely to say “oh, but this tariff will support American manufacturing jobs!” until you realize that the only two solar panel manufacturers in the country are both bankrupt and foreign-owned. The entire solar industry opposes this tariff and predicts tens of thousands of jobs lost, but the two companies (Suniva and SolarWorld) ‘petitioned’ Trump to punish Chinese solar manufacturers, and he did so.
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Drumpf didn’t do this on purpose. Somebody slipped a cover page on the tariff authorization titled “Huuuuge Coal washing incentive plan” with some simple language in an executive summary that implied it would help sweep pornstars under the rug and make his hands look bigger.
It seems to be that the legislation setting up this mechanism did not intend to provide an overall positive effect on the economy but to provide relief specifically to those industries which had been harmed by foreign government actions.
Well, I was giving you the viewpoint from the people here in town who were driven out of business by solar panels produced in government-sponsored Chinese factories at lower prices than any country with our environmental and wage laws could match without direct government intervention. I myself was never an employee of either of the two local companies, just a nearly innocent bystander, so I can’t make claim to definitive knowledge of what companies would or would not have succeeded if the Chinese hadn’t dumped panels at below cost.
One of the many interesting factors was the spike in silicon prices during the financial debacles of 2008.
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Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, it’s just that a lot of people seem to have the impression that solar cells use rare earth metals and, for better or for worse, over the years I’ve found that it is far more effective to ask them which metals they’re talking about than it is to argue with them. For silicon solar cells – by far the most commercially important ones – it simply isn’t true. And for the most part it isn’t so true for other types of solar cells, though it varies depending on the type of cell.
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The solar scorecard is awesome and I’m really glad SVTC does it, but if you read the fine print or talk to the folks at SVTC you’ll find that those zeros don’t necessarily mean those companies are bad on the particular topic, all it means is that they neither responded to SVTC’s questions nor publicly reported anything on it. SVTC scores an absence of information with zero. And quite a few of the companies on the list are very large, but sell little to nothing in the US, so they really couldn’t care less how SVTC scores them.
You’re right, solar module production can be quite dirty and consume a lot of energy. The parts of the value chain that consume the most energy – by far – are not captured in the SVTC scorecard because the almost none of the companies they survey do those parts of the process. (These would be polysilicon production – silicon purification, essentially – and silicon wafer production.) Environmental protections in China definitely are not what they are in the US and Europe, but it’s getting better. In fact, polysilicon prices have been unexpectedly high for the last 6 months or so because Chinese environmental regulators have been shutting down polysilicon factories until they improve their emissions.
All of that said, the US was the world leader in polysilicon production until about 2013 because it has loads of cheap, reliable hydropower available. Then the US imposed tariffs on Chinese solar cells and modules and China retaliated with tariffs on American polysilicon. The US polysilicon industry collapsed (this is largely, though not entirely, responsible for the collapse of SunEdison – the company was also terribly mismanaged) and the tariffs did nothing to increase US manufacturing. Our solar trade surplus turned into a deficit, all because of US protectionism. Expect more of the same from this latest round.
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The US already had less than 10% of global solar manufacturing capacity by the time Chinese manufacturers were accused of dumping, and it was a Europe-based company that initiated the tariff complaints in both Europe and the US. There were some US factories that probably had a legitimate complaint, but when you have a tiny pilot line running an immature technology competing against a high-volume manufacturer building cookie-cutter copy-exact production lines, you already have an uphill battle. Most of the US manufacturers that went out of business were startups that fall in that latter category.
Silicon prices did indeed reach a peak in 2008-2009, but they had been rising since 2004. The cause had nothing to do with the financial crisis. Long story short, there was a shortage of silicon purification capacity that started in 2004 and ended in 2009. It takes a long time to build a solar purification plant and a relatively short time to build a solar cell plant, so demand increased faster than capacity, causing a shortage. If anything, the financial crisis hastened the end of the shortage and brought silicon prices back down to earth.
But it’s interesting you mention the financial crisis. In its wake, you may remember, US and European banks were loathe to lend money. That stopped the construction of new factories in its tracks, not just in the solar industry but in many others too. You know whose banks avoided the crisis and were flush with cash and ready to lend it in 2008? China’s. The moment the US and Europe were forced by banks to stop building solar module factories is exactly when China really got started in earnest.
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Indium is used to make the transparent electrodes for silicon solar cells. It’s an expensive material, but still not a rare earth metal, and there’s production in various countries.
Actually it did, but not that particular crisis; Astropower, for example, was running on waste silicon from the electronics industry (I knew the guy that drove the fork lift) and when that industry got hammered in the wake of the dot-bomb bubble bursting, prices started their upwards climb, and didn’t stop climbing until the domestic solar industry had collapsed.
Right, exactly. The cause of the spike didn’t matter - it was the unavailability of working capital (due to the TARP fiasco) during that spike that made it so difficult to survive in the face of global competition.
But again, I’m just repeating stuff from locals who went out of business trying to make solar cells domestically, I don’t pretend to have the depth of knowledge they do. What they say lines up pretty well with what you’re saying!
The only commercially produced silicon solar cells that use transparent electrodes are heterojunction solar cells, and the only company that makes heterojunction solar cells in significant quantities is Panasonic. And even if Panasonic’s deal to make solar cells for Tesla ramps up to its full planned volume, they still will not be a top 10 producer in terms of volume.
That said, there is interest by many companies in making heterojunction solar cells and there may soon be a somewhat higher volume on the market, but even the most bullish analysts don’t see them getting more than 10% of the market in the next 10 years. But the solar industry changes fast, so who knows…
Really? I thought it had become common. Well, thanks for the info - it’s interesting.
Yes, that’s it. The entire solar industry used scrap silicon from the semiconductor industry until the early 2000s, when they began to realize the industry was going to grow beyond the available supply of scrap silicon (exacerbated by the fact that the semiconductor industry was, as you say, under pressure and using more of its own scrap internally, thus shrinking the supply available to the solar industry). The solar industry turned to polysilicon manufacturers and asked them to increase capacity, but that is a capital-intensive business and they had already gotten burned on expansion in the early '90s, so they asked solar manufacturers to provide capital and/or sign binding long-term contracts. Solar manufacturers plead poverty and balked, the new capacity didn’t get built, and in 2004 silicon prices started to skyrocket.
I visited Astropower in the mid-'90s and have worked with various people who spent time there over the years. It was an interesting company with a lot of smart people. It wasn’t just that they got hammered by the dot-com bubble bursting, though, they engaged in some pretty shady business practices. I forget the details, but their founder went from being a hero of the solar industry to a bit of a pariah.
Well, perhaps on the larger stage, but nobody around here ever called him a hero. In fact, I’ve never heard anyone who worked directly with Dr. Barnett say anything nice about his personality or business practices, either before or after Astropower’s founding. But he did spearhead some impressive solar cell science at UD, so I respect and appreciate his work in that avenue.
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