Companies are building a lot of new solar factories in China. "Solar PV capex trending at US$9 billion annually as new GW fabs in China slash investments requi

Companies are building a lot of new solar factories in China. "Solar PV capex trending at US$9 billion annually as new GW fabs in China slash investments required" https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/solar-pv-capex-trending-at-us9-billion-annually-as-new-gw-fabs-in-china-sla https://www.pv-tech.org/editors-blog/solar-pv-capex-trending... China is where the ecosystem of experienced manufacturers, material suppliers, and manufacturing equipment suppliers all comes together now. The rest of the world's solar manufacturers are struggling because the Chinese ones have such economies of scale that it's difficult to compete head-on. (Barring perhaps First Solar. First Solar is still doing ok because it has achieved multi-gigawatt manufacturing scale too, and because its product has advantages when operating in high temperature conditions. Also there are a few other solar manufacturers that can weather the storm because they're part of large conglomerates, like LG.) Non-Chinese solar manufacturers like to cry "unfair competition" at low Chinese solar prices, but after reading industry trade publications for several years I am skeptical of that argument. To me it looks like Chinese PV companies did get government protection and incentives to establish themselves, but no worse than Western countries give to their own favored industries. And now they can produce good products at unbeatable prices. Not a whole lot different from Japan overtaking American radio and TV manufacturers in decades past, or (more recently) China rapidly overtaking incumbents to become the world's largest lithium ion battery manufacturer.