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Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super
by willvarfar 11mo ago
Ignoring the politics, we have to say that China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service in strategically developing and mass producing super cheap solar panels.
- hangonhn 11mo agoIt really is a huge service not just to the developed world that needs to decarbonize but also a huge service to the developing world. Solar can be put up quickly and cheaply and is good for about 2 decades and can be paired with cheap LiFo batteries to give round the clock electricity. Both of these are relatively portable. It can really bootstrap the economies of local communities where infrastructure hasn't been built out. Then combined that with portable Internet connection via something like Starlink or one of the competitor networks, we can really enable the available human capital in developing nations to realize their potential. It's all very exciting I think.
- jacquesm 11mo agoThe biggest bottle neck to really solving the energy problem is now the price and fragility of high voltage DC long haul connections. Between those and solar you can have energy anywhere any time.
- svara 11mo agoGreat point, you might dream of long range connections sending solar energy from the day into the night around the world. But, what exactly do you mean by fragility? In what way are they fragile?
- jacquesm 11mo agoThat they carry massive amounts of power so they'll help you to destruct themselves once the barrier is penetrated, are actually quite complex and can be sabotaged easily. This is a nice text on the underwater version: https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introduction-to-HVDC-Subsea-Cables-16-July-2012_.pdf https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...
- more_corn 11mo agoIf only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred. We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.
- jacquesm 11mo agoYou missed the point entirely. If you can distribute the energy you don't need the storage and the storage is the problem right now.
- bryanlarsen 11mo agoStarlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind. The solar+battery revolution is doing for power what cell phones did for communications in the third world in the 90's and 2000's.
- skydhash 11mo agoThe one issue with cellular connection is that some software and OS slurp data like there’s no tomorrow and you’re not paying for the connection.
- rdm_blackhole 11mo ago> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind. There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage. And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town. So yes Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.
- maccard 11mo agoMeanwhile here in UK, we’re unable to get phone signal in the middle of major population centres
- floam 11mo agoNot literally no signal/service, right? More likely “I have a few bars but data doesn’t seem to work… calls often won’t initiate unless 911?” thing you get when there’s too many devices connecting to an overburdened tower, in a network that needs more cells or something, and QoS/qci says no? If it’s a population center someone would probably have put up a tower on their land ll
- maccard 11mo agoYes. In the context of “cheap mobile data devices are widely accessible” I don’t think the distinction matters. If you’re relying on your £1 sim to trigger your solar battery charger and it doesn’t, then it doesn’t matter if you technically had signal or not.
- metabagel 11mo agoIt is exciting. > On farmland and on rooftops, Iraqis turn to solar as power grid falters https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-iraqis-turn-solar-power-grid-falters-2025-08-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/farmland-rooftops-ir...
- energy123 11mo agoAnd the US and Germany since the 1970s for putting public funds into early research
- unglaublich 11mo agoUS fossil fuel subsidies: 757B$ [0] US solar subsidies: 7B$ [1] [0]: https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-reduce-fossil-fuel-subsidies-january-2024 https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-proposals-to-red... [1]: https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/renewable-energy-still-dominates-energy-subsidies-in-fy-2022/ https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/rene...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 11mo agoWe are all likely complicit. When gas prices go up people lose their shit so politicians try not to let that happen thus massive subsidies. Plus it's strategically important.
- davidw 11mo agoPeople also absolutely lose their shit when someone does something like build a bike lane, or proposes letting the market allocate automobile storage for housing and businesses, rather than having a local jurisdiction invent some numbers.
- energy123 11mo agoI'm referring to Jimmy Carter's policies that helped kick start solar research prior to the baton being passed off to private industry post a viability threshold being surpassed.
- stuffn 11mo ago[dead]
- goodpoint 11mo agoOn top of that the very same oil industry pocketing the 757B does lobbying and propaganda "renewables don't work yadda yadda".
- tasty_freeze 11mo agoFor years I've been hearing one excuse for the US not doing more about climate change is that China is polluting more and if they aren't doing something about it then why should we? The argument always seemed disingenuous. For sure, China produces a lot of pollution as they are modernizing, but they are also investing a lot in the direction of sustainability. If we take the balance of (pollution produced - pollution prevented) for the two countries, the day will come, if it isn't now, that the US is on the losing side of that comparison, and I wonder what the new argument will be for the US not doing more.
- Freedom2 11mo agoIt's easier to understand that excuse when people realize that Americans tend to start with a conclusion then work their way backwards to support it. As in, 'we aren't doing much about climate change so here's why that's okay'.
- inerte 11mo agoI am not familiar with Chinese politics or motivation, but I wonder if it's for the same arguments we have in the US, "save the world" vs. "the strong can do whatever they want". I am not sure China does for the sake of sustainability and environment. Yes I know the end result might be the same but are the reasons the same?
- martinpw 11mo agoI keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things? The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly: - The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past. - Such disasters often lead to regime change (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest) - The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change. - Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power. So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.
- almosthere 11mo agoThey are so cheap, infact, that no other country in the world is able to compete even with huge tariffs.
- lnsru 11mo agoThey are not cheap. They are extremely efficient at manufacturing. The 201st panel look exactly the same as 1st one. Definitely no human labor involved. Huge well readable serial numbers placed on multiple places of the panel for camera based identification. Usually no single failing panel in shipping container. The bad ones were clearly damaged during transportation. This efficiency looks scary when I see output of my workplace in Germany.
- almosthere 11mo agoSorry I should have used the word "inexpensive" I was not referring to the quality, I was referring to the price. I own many Chinese built panels.
- jl6 11mo agoLet's hope someone can do the same for grid-scale seasonal storage. "Excess" solar electricity won't be free in (noon, summer) if you can easily bank it for (night, winter).
- BoredPositron 11mo agoIt's a thread about Australia not Austria.
- jocaal 11mo agoPower travels near the speed of light. In theory, the entire globe can be connected and countries with daylight can supply those at night in a cycle.
- fooker 11mo agoWe would need impractically high voltages to minimize power loss over long distances. Maybe something like microwave transmission or cheap superconductors will solve it.
- Tade0 11mo agoThe loss is not that much - approximately 3.5% per 1000km. IIRC the Changji-Guquan HVDC line reported around 8% over 3300km thanks to working at 1100kV. Extend that to 10k km and you're looking at approximately 25%, but if it's surplus solar, who cares? Such a line costs as much as a highway broadly speaking, so it's not impossible to build.
- mrguyorama 11mo agoFor reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts. Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive. The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to enable the ability to quite literally waste solar power on inefficient processes (including things like industrial processes that produce less CO2 or generating hydrogen or methane as long term energy storage), we have to get the government to make it happen But, uh, we hired people who would rather spend $170 billion on harassing random cities and brown people so..... Everyone get ready to pay absurd rates for electricity to support outdated businesses that have been directing American energy policy since Reagan, including paying about 60k coal miners in west virginia for a resource that is economically inferior to other fossil fuels but because they voted for a democrat once they now get a stranglehold on the US economy.
- SideburnsOfDoom 11mo agoFor all the people hyping LLM AI in order to raise lots of cash, solar and battery is the real transformational technology of our time. But it gets less press, as it just doesn't benefit a few, who need the press hype.
- shadyKeystrokes 11mo ago[flagged]
- gambiting 11mo agoHow is that even remotely related to this topic or to what OP said? Or do you just have a thing you want to rant about no matter the topic?
- shadyKeystrokes 11mo ago[dead]
- teemur 11mo agoDon't forget Germany. If you look at the amount of PV built in Germany early this century and make some admittedly strong assumptions about learning curve, one could argue the Energiewende, then usually called failure, singlehandedly accelerated PV development by decades. I don't recall Germany ever credited on that.
- antonymoose 11mo agoI remember some old tidbit about the American westward expansion, most railroad projects failed and went bankrupt and were sold for pennies on the dollar to the ultimate owners. Something sad about that, really.
- csours 11mo agoSee also the dark fiber build out before the telecom collapse of ~2001 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_crash
- hylaride 11mo agoA lot of them got built with per-mile subsidies and cashed out via shoddy construction. The ones that focused on long-term financial sustainability more often did fine, but it is a lesson in perverse incentives (though some would argue that afterwards cheap overbuilt lines facilitated much faster and more extensive westward expansion of people).
- dylan604 11mo agomove fast, break things is never a good long term plan
- limagnolia 11mo agoBy building the initial rails cheaply, they could then bring in equipment and supplies over those rails to rebuild the railroad to a much better quality, and at a lower cost than if they had to bring that equipment and supplies in without the rails in the first instance. That doesn't mean they always actually invested the money to rebuild properly... but it was sound engineering theory. Of course, there were other financial shenanigans too- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9dit_Mobilier_scandal
- lazyeye 11mo agoThe article was about Australia, not China. Incidentally it was also Australia that invented the modern solar panel.
- nosianu 11mo ago> The article was about Australia, not China. And??? The parent commenter wrote about the manufacturer of said solar panels, going outside the frame of that article to something related but still relevant, given that that article surely is meant to stimulate a more general discussion.
- lazyeye 11mo agoSeems like every 2nd post on HN, regardless of the actual content, becomes an argument between advocates for the US and China. In the case of China it's particularly egregious as they get to use US platforms to push their cause, whilst China blocks all foreign foreign access their own platforms. It's tiresome.
- breve 11mo ago> China has done the world collectively as a whole a major service I doubt the Uyghurs would agree: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636 https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/in-broad-daylight-uyghur-forced-labour-and-global-solar-supply-chains/ https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/in-broad... https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/gb-energy-blocks-use-of-solar-panels-linked-to-forced-labour https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/gb-energy-blocks-use-... https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/solar-companies-linked-to-forced-labour https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/solar-companies-linked-to-...
- acdha 11mo agoI agree their treatment of the Uyghurs is deplorable but the way you had to chop that quote like a creationist undermines your point. It’s possible to say China has done both good and bad things, and recognizing the cost rather than denying something factual is probably a more effective.
- breve 11mo agoYou're rationalizing slavery. That kind of nihilistic apathy is never useful.
- acdha 11mo agoNot in the slightest. I’m saying that it’s possible to recognize that evil without denying that something else is good. Just do both at the same time, like how we might say that the world has benefited from polyurethane, digital computers (Konrad Zuse), or rocketry without in any way excusing the Nazi government which controlled Germany at the time.
- breve 11mo agoYou are entirely rationalizing it.
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- maxglute 11mo agoNever going to happen but there should be some sort of global emission accounting standard to factor in exporting goods that reduce emissions (over lifetimes), vs not, i.e. a barrel of oil burned should count at producer side the consumer side.