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Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China
- PonyGumbo 16y agoThis is local for me. We're losing 800 jobs.
- toephu 16y agothis is local for me. we're gaining 400 jobs. (we work 2x harder than those lazy americans)
- onteria 16y agoThis brings up some really weird reader that screws up the layout in Chrome. Here's a standard one page link instead: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environment/15solar.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environmen...
- raintrees 16y agoThanks for this link, I would have otherwise skipped this article for now. I received a warning that nyt was trying to store data on my system "for offline use."
- knowtheory 16y agoThe link above is to a page intended for the NYT's Google Chrome App. It does indeed cache articles and the like in your browser as per the HTML5 spec, so that if you were to lose your connectivity (say on a mobile device) you could continue to browse and review stuff the app has cached. I happen to think that this layout is considerably less annoying than the NYT's main site.
- raintrees 16y agoThanks. After finishing the article, I found the definition of that request: https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Offline_resources_in_Firefox https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Offline_resources_in_Firefo.... I am guessing I had pre-primed myself for paranoid thinking after previously reading another HN post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106677 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106677.
- pstuart 16y agoIt appears from the outset that Evergreen was operating in bad faith in accepting government stimulus, but they did have their back against the wall. China has dirt cheap labor, no pollution regulations and strong government support -- how can any US manufacturing survive against that?
- mikecarlucci 16y agoAccording the article, and assuming Evergreen and China are honest about environmental regulations, the labor prices are not the real issue here. It's grants and loans made by the Chinese banks and local governments that are making up the bulk of the savings. Still, $300 per month per employee in China vs $5400 in Massachusetts is going to turn some attention to China regardless of other costs.
- ximeng 16y agoWould be interesting to know how polluting these factories are. I visited a solar panel factory in China and it was pretty much as described here: clean, white rooms, automated machines, protective clothing for staff. Didn't look like there was much sign of pollution. The other question is the long term effect of this export of work to China. Can they really make a profit at this rate, or are they hoping that by selling below cost and concentrating manufacturing within China they will eventually be able to invest in research at a better return and one day start extracting economic rents on their monopoly in manufacturing knowledge.
- knowtheory 16y agowell, the other thing to consider is whether China is basically trying to do what Walmart did to it's competitors. If you can undercut competition to the point where your competitors drop out, then you have free reign to do whatever you wish in the market, since you have a monopoly.
- ximeng 16y agoThis depends on how quickly you can ramp up capacity if China starts to increase prices or decrease supply. My guess with developed countries is that the answer to that is "not quickly", as we tend to be more fastidious about bureaucracy. The rate of ramping back up capacity decreases even quicker once China starts to get an R&D advantage from economies of scale and years of research into improving their processes. Compare the hoo hah over rare earth metals. Who's responsible for long-term planning of renewables in the US? The first result in DDG for "US renewable energy plan" is "US renewable energy plan 'shortsighted'": http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/us-renewable-energy-plan-short.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=specrt11_head_Misguided%20states http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2008/10/...
- john_horton 16y agoOn the bright side, the supposed force driving the move (plunging prices for solar panels) is a good thing.
- melvinram 16y agoI upvoted because I hadn't seen this layout for the NYT website before. It's kind of neat, especially when you click the X button the top right. Very cleanly laid out.
- jws 16y ago6.8 megabytes of downloaded data to read a single article. That is my entire daily bandwidth budget on my wireless plan.
- gaius 16y agoThis is how their iPad app looks.
- Estragon 16y agoIt was completely unreadable for me, on firefox, ubuntu lynx. Fortunately, readability cleaned it up.
- riobard 16y agoThis is their Chrome webapp.
- barrkel 16y agohttp://i.imgur.com/BAefW.png http://i.imgur.com/BAefW.png Very clean :) (Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows 7)
- storm 16y agoCompletely fubar on my Nexus One - hangs for a half minute on load, then all I see is the categories/account/etc panel.
- cagatayk 16y agoSo we're loaning the finance industry trillion dollars at essentially zero interest rate just so they can lend it back to federal government by buying treasuries and pocket the difference (and thus "recover from the crisis"), while China lends tens of billions dollars more than US does to solar energy companies. I hope I'm not the only one who finds the implications scary.
- ck2 16y agoThis is exactly what is going to happen with the lithium battery technologies being developed for hybrids - lots of federal money being poured into research with no restrictions on where they are going to be made. LiFePo4 battery technology was invented in the USA but now is mostly made in China. Why do we protect corn with massive subsidies and massive import tariffs (creating horror shows of destructive ethanol, food products and animal feed) but not our technology and jobs?
- riobard 16y agoYou want all the (potential) pollution?
- anonymous246 16y agoCitation? This seems to be a reflexive "counterpoint" to anybody who says that manufacturing can be done in the US. I live near a car plant and have lived near a small semiconductor fab (in the US) and I can tell you that I've never seen any smoke or smelled anything. I've also lived in India and even small-scale industries used to emit smoke and smells (indicating chemicals). The point being that China and India choose to pollute (to save costs), not that the technology to manufacture with low impact doesn't exist. In almost any major US city, if you go a couple of miles perpendicular to most major roads, you will likely see some light industrial activity. It's usually so quiet and non-polluting that you don't even realize it's there. At least, that's been my experience. YMMV.
- riobard 16y agoThat's exactly my point. You don't want pollution. Factories in the U.S. need to take care of that. And it costs money. Moving to less regulated places like China and India saves that cost.
- anonymous246 16y agoOk. Your original post sounded as if you thought the technology to do things with low impact didn't exist (i.e., pollution was inevitable). On a different note: So you're OK with pollution in China? You do realize that China and the US are on the same planet, right? Airborne pollution from China is exacerbating fog in LA [1]. A beneficial example is that sands of the Sahara are a major source of fertilization in the Amazon [2]. [1] http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=392&catid=10&subcatid=66 http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=392&catid=10... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_storm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_storm
- toephu 16y agogo China!