5 ms·

Extending the life of existing power infra is low-hanging fruit for more power short term, but the economics of renewables are just unstoppable. Article states

Extending the life of existing power infra is low-hanging fruit for more power short term, but the economics of renewables are just unstoppable. Article states 93% of new generation capacity was renewable which is good, but I can sense that nimbyism is growing towards wind and solar. Not to mention the animus towards China who has wisely cornered manufacturing of these. The US has shot itself in the foot because of its energy dependence on its own energy source. The resource curse strikes again.

Amezarak 6mo ago
The WTO found that China cornered the market with illegal dumping. Of course the investigations and punishments are too little too late.
- mekdoonggi 6mo ago
  That may be the case, though from a US perspective, in terms of "unilaterally acting to gain control of other markets" being bad, we aren't a position to criticize.
0xWTF 6mo ago
What's even more important is how solar, and to a lesser extent other tech, served as a gateway for China to accumulate electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry talent the US seems committed to offshoring by incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China). We are training them and not our own.
- mrroper 6mo ago
  [flagged]
- asdff 6mo ago
  >incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China) That isn't how that works. Domestic students are just as cheap.
  - linkjuice4all 6mo ago
    Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Trump and team are trying to insert via executive order, strategic defunding, and all the other mob/shakedown behavior.
    - selimthegrim 6mo ago
      It was also the case at MIT that students on an NSF fellowship cost the PI more to hire.
    - asdff 6mo ago
      >GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.
      - 0xWTF 6mo ago
        > Operation Paperclip Even without internet, many of the scientists of Eastern European extraction were able to share secrets to the Soviets. I don't believe any Operation Paperclip scientists were directly implicated as atomic spies (and there may be some reasons the US wouldn't want to bring attention to that), but plenty of other operations occurred, and plenty of other scientists did in fact share secrets with the Soviets. Now, with the Internet and strong crypto, it's trivial for Chinese professors to send IP back to collaborators in China. That is the basis of the 1000 Talents Plan (1), one of 200 Chinese "talent recruitment" plans. This is not at all hypothetical. I used to swim with Kang Zhang, who has done amazing work to cure chlamydial blindness, but also took that IP from the US to China (2). Another ophthalmologist would drive all the way from UCLA (the north end of LA) to San Diego to swim with us. I asked him why. He said it was to keep an eye on Kang: he had more macaques in China to run experiments on than anyone in the US could possibly access. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Zhang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Zhang
- mekdoonggi 6mo ago
  I don't think the engineering talent was the bottleneck. The difference was the long-term planning and industrial policy of China. I think you're giving the US Universities far too much credence, and the US myopic political situation far too little scrutiny.
philipallstar 6mo ago
I still don't understand the economics when it comes to power all the time, not some of the time, and I rarely see that being mentioned in this sort of gung-ho post. I want to feel how you feel - can you help with the specifics there?
- mekdoonggi 6mo ago
  Easy. US puts panels, turbines and batteries everywhere connected in big grid. Grid is big enough that something is always generating, and batteries smooth out the curve. Power is priced dynamically. Cheap solar at noon? Do big work. High demand in evening? Discharge battery. Power is always available, but cost goes up and down. Daily, god willing.
  - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
    In theory that works as long as you're willing to let the price reflect actual supply and demand even when the difference is very large, e.g. it has been cloudy and still for a couple weeks so the batteries are low and then you get a hot summer day or cold winter night with a lot of demand. No problem, we'll just set the price to "high enough to get people to stop cooling/heating their buildings" and the market will clear. But people aren't going to like that.
    - mekdoonggi 6mo ago
      The demand can be more elastic than you envision. If power is expensive on a given day, electric cars can wait to charge, or even discharge if they aren't going to be used. People can wait to run laundry dryers. The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary. People might not like changing their habits to follow the energy, but they'll probably be pretty happy when the end result is both good for the environment and cheaper overall. At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.
      - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
knappe 6mo ago
Some panel manufacturing has been moved to the US and is actually thriving. Qcells keeps growing, year over year and as of 2023 had expanded their US facilities to manufacture more than 5.1 GW[0] of annual production. I'm aware this is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 339 GW[1] of annual production in China, but we're also talking about a single manufacturer operating in an actively hostile administration and yet is still managing to grow. Given this is the top comment on the article at the moment, I thought it was worth at least pushing back on this sentiment at least a little bit. [0]https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-dalton-factory-expansion/ https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-da... [1] https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-production https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-produ...
- leonidasrup 6mo ago
  It will interesting to see the effects of solar tariffs on four Southeast Asian countries. https://think.ing.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-have-up-to-3521-us-tariffs-on-southeast-asian-solar-imports/ https://think.ing.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-have-up-... https://www.reuters.com/world/china/solar-dominates-import-seizures-after-us-ban-chinese-forced-labor-goods-2026-02-24/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/solar-dominates-import-s... Maybe this will help to revitalize the US solar manufacturing. In Europe there is almost no solar manufacturing, just importing solar manufactured in China. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-make-tariff-decision-solar-panels-india-indonesia-laos-2026-02-23/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-mak...

Amezarak 6mo ago

The WTO found that China cornered the market with illegal dumping. Of course the investigations and punishments are too little too late.

mekdoonggi 6mo ago
That may be the case, though from a US perspective, in terms of "unilaterally acting to gain control of other markets" being bad, we aren't a position to criticize.

0xWTF 6mo ago

What's even more important is how solar, and to a lesser extent other tech, served as a gateway for China to accumulate electrical engineering, physics, and chemistry talent the US seems committed to offshoring by incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China). We are training them and not our own.

mrroper 6mo ago
[flagged]
asdff 6mo ago
>incentivizing universities to hire the cheapest available grad student talent (inevitably from China) That isn't how that works. Domestic students are just as cheap.
- linkjuice4all 6mo ago
  Domestic students sometimes get a local/in-state discount so they actually cost more since they aren't paying as much tuition upfront. GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. This was already an issue before Trump II but has been exacerbated by ICE's gestapo tactics along with all of the other roadblocks that Trump and team are trying to insert via executive order, strategic defunding, and all the other mob/shakedown behavior.
  - selimthegrim 6mo ago
    It was also the case at MIT that students on an NSF fellowship cost the PI more to hire.
  - asdff 6mo ago
    >GP also alluded to international students coming to the US to learn and then taking their big brains back home instead of starting a company here. I'm not sure this is such a big issue. If the research environment is poor in their home country, the VC environment is probably even worse. Also consider every foreign professor teaching in the US right now is essentially a modern Operation Paperclip victory against their homeland. And there are a lot of them. Plus the student is still contributing to American research efforts as a grad student here. It isn't all unilateral effort unilateral benefit. They are advancing their PIs grant effort. They are probably teaching and mentoring.
    - 0xWTF 6mo ago
      > Operation Paperclip Even without internet, many of the scientists of Eastern European extraction were able to share secrets to the Soviets. I don't believe any Operation Paperclip scientists were directly implicated as atomic spies (and there may be some reasons the US wouldn't want to bring attention to that), but plenty of other operations occurred, and plenty of other scientists did in fact share secrets with the Soviets. Now, with the Internet and strong crypto, it's trivial for Chinese professors to send IP back to collaborators in China. That is the basis of the 1000 Talents Plan (1), one of 200 Chinese "talent recruitment" plans. This is not at all hypothetical. I used to swim with Kang Zhang, who has done amazing work to cure chlamydial blindness, but also took that IP from the US to China (2). Another ophthalmologist would drive all the way from UCLA (the north end of LA) to San Diego to swim with us. I asked him why. He said it was to keep an eye on Kang: he had more macaques in China to run experiments on than anyone in the US could possibly access. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Zhang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Zhang
mekdoonggi 6mo ago
I don't think the engineering talent was the bottleneck. The difference was the long-term planning and industrial policy of China. I think you're giving the US Universities far too much credence, and the US myopic political situation far too little scrutiny.

philipallstar 6mo ago

I still don't understand the economics when it comes to power all the time, not some of the time, and I rarely see that being mentioned in this sort of gung-ho post. I want to feel how you feel - can you help with the specifics there?

mekdoonggi 6mo ago
Easy. US puts panels, turbines and batteries everywhere connected in big grid. Grid is big enough that something is always generating, and batteries smooth out the curve. Power is priced dynamically. Cheap solar at noon? Do big work. High demand in evening? Discharge battery. Power is always available, but cost goes up and down. Daily, god willing.
- AnthonyMouse 6mo ago
  In theory that works as long as you're willing to let the price reflect actual supply and demand even when the difference is very large, e.g. it has been cloudy and still for a couple weeks so the batteries are low and then you get a hot summer day or cold winter night with a lot of demand. No problem, we'll just set the price to "high enough to get people to stop cooling/heating their buildings" and the market will clear. But people aren't going to like that.
  - mekdoonggi 6mo ago
    The demand can be more elastic than you envision. If power is expensive on a given day, electric cars can wait to charge, or even discharge if they aren't going to be used. People can wait to run laundry dryers. The market will incentivize actors to smooth out before those kinds of restrictions are necessary. People might not like changing their habits to follow the energy, but they'll probably be pretty happy when the end result is both good for the environment and cheaper overall. At least in my corner of the Midwest, either the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and often both.
    - AnthonyMouse 6mo ago

knappe 6mo ago

Some panel manufacturing has been moved to the US and is actually thriving. Qcells keeps growing, year over year and as of 2023 had expanded their US facilities to manufacture more than 5.1 GW[0] of annual production. I'm aware this is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated 339 GW[1] of annual production in China, but we're also talking about a single manufacturer operating in an actively hostile administration and yet is still managing to grow. Given this is the top comment on the article at the moment, I thought it was worth at least pushing back on this sentiment at least a little bit. [0]https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-dalton-factory-expansion/ https://us.qcells.com/blog/qcells-north-america-completes-da... [1] https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-production https://futurism.com/science-energy/solar-energy-china-produ...

leonidasrup 6mo ago
It will interesting to see the effects of solar tariffs on four Southeast Asian countries. https://think.ing.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-have-up-to-3521-us-tariffs-on-southeast-asian-solar-imports/ https://think.ing.com/articles/what-does-it-mean-to-have-up-... https://www.reuters.com/world/china/solar-dominates-import-seizures-after-us-ban-chinese-forced-labor-goods-2026-02-24/ https://www.reuters.com/world/china/solar-dominates-import-s... Maybe this will help to revitalize the US solar manufacturing. In Europe there is almost no solar manufacturing, just importing solar manufactured in China. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-make-tariff-decision-solar-panels-india-indonesia-laos-2026-02-23/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-mak...