Falling Panel Prices Lead to Global Solar Boom, Except for the Us
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The global solar industry is booming due to falling panel prices, but the US lags behind due to factors like trade policies and the shale gas boom, sparking debate about the country's energy future.
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Personally I like the idea of an electric car doubling as a house battery but so far I think only the F-150 lightning is capable of doing that.
No, but it's cheaper than it ever was and panels are so cheap that they can have ROI even without storage. That said, grid solar makes the most financial sense if you're not in an off-grid location.
The economics on storage only kicks in after scaling the grid with a lot of solar, but adding solar to that point is itself profitable almost anywhere.
Once you're curtailing a bunch of power during the daytime, then you can add storage as a no brainer bonus and stop curtailing.
It’s clearly a net win environmentally and economically, but for anyone who sees nuclear as part of a green future storage in some form is a massive requirement.
If you exclude China, effectively no nuclear plants have been built in the last decade, and the existing fleet is aging out. "We shouldn't do this thing, because it might threaten that other thing that we don't do anymore" is a weird argument.
But yea building nuclear is all about forecasting the future so most of the damage has already occurred here, still advocates are going to advocate even if what they say doesn’t make sense.
In general yes, grid solar + grid batteries are cheaper than any peaking power plants. So now 24/7 batteries + wind + solar generally outcompetes nuclear, coal, or natural gas on price as long as there’s no tariffs involved.
This isn’t enough to make batteries + solar viable in Alaska but long distance transmission lines could solve that issue cost effectively.
I’ve got an usually good location for small scale hydro, there was even a mill on the property, but it just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
Rather than building 10x as much solar in the north + battery systems + winter hydrogen storage etc long distance HVDC to cities and the surrounding grid just makes so much more sense. Even better because the state is huge and the population is tiny they can go nearly 100% hydro.
Where batteries could be useful is operating those long distance power lines at nearly 100% 24/7 then load shifting via batteries to match local demand.
For seasonal storage, round trip efficiency is mostly irrelevant; the relevant metric is capex per unit of stored energy.
A panel in Alaska only collects so much sunlight over the summer before considering efficiency losses from Hydrogen. It would require buying panels that effectively get ~1 month of use over the entire year due to efficiency losses + limited gathering period, and solar isn’t that cheap.
So in Alaska you’re just better off only using panels directly in the summer which at least provide several months of electricity per year. In say Texas on the other hand you get energy from a panel year round so a marginal panel purchased to generate hydrogen at say 20% round trip efficiency gets 30% * 9 months + say 70% of average production for the 3 winter months = 4.8 months of winter electricity per year. Of course you also need to pay for the hydrogen generating machine and the hydrogen burning device, but that’s not necessarily problematic.
If the basement rock is close to the surface and is crystalline, it probably involves deep mining to form cavities, which would raise the capex by maybe an order of magnitude. Other options could become cheaper then, say storing ammonia.
This is for large scale storage, of course, not for individual residences.
https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/standard-thermal-copy
For example, last Sunday Germany covered more than 100% of its own power load with renewables even though winter is approaching. Only a small part of that was solar power, most electricity was generated by wind turbines: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
As I said elsewhere I'm thinking ultra low capex thermal storage will edge out hydrogen here, though.
Having energy cost related scheduled (winter) downtime gives the plants proper maintenance windows.
With free power but only during surplus peaks in summer when the grid can't transmit a large utility solar farm's entire production, and the day/night/weekday time shifting batteries are also already fully active, you could (looks like the math checks out) electrolytically refine iron ore into iron metal (for later smelting in an arc furnace) just about cost-competitively with (coal-fired) blast furnace operation. The key is to skip most overhead by operating them only to eat otherwise-curtailed production and connecting them to the DC bus between the MPPT and the grid inverter (same as the day/night shifting battery).
Communities in the north will use diesel generators in the winter (nothing else is viable). Again, I assume you are talking about off grid communities, which is basically all of them except a few cities (and most cities have their own grids disconnected from the rest, especially Southeast Alaska).
Half of Germany is north of the straight part of the US/Canada border...
I'm pretty sure PG&E pays back something like only 5% of the generation of my solar panels. I'll end the year with $400 more generated than used, and I'll get a check for $20...
If it wasn’t, parts of the country wouldn’t be invested in adding it.
Recent discussion on HN on a similar topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45706527
The way you worded this implies that you disagree. Are you aware of why wholesale prices aren't constant?
We will run with 100% renewables for years, and there will still be people asking if storage has been solved already. We will just solve every large issue, and suffer lots of small issues.
Also, if you are using your car as a battery, you can't use it as a car. It's more likely that you will have extra batteries at home so that you can charge your car when you want.
Getting solar panels forces you onto a plan in which they charge more per kwh pulled from the grid. The surplus electricity is only credited at the generation cost which is only 1/4 the total cost per kwh. (Delivery costs is 3x the price of electricity).
So if you want to go solar to save money you need both batteries and solar panels which is not an insignificant amount of money.
Thinking of national policy from a home owner perspective is expected, but it isn't always instructive.
For the latter item, my Rivian has a relatively paltry 1500W inverter with standard 110W plugs in the back seat, truck bed, and gear tunnel, but I can use a rectifier/power supply to pull a constant 1kW, step that back to DC and feed it into my home's battery backup system. My whole house tends to use ~2kW at peak, and obviously can conserve in outages. So I get my normal 4kWh battery bank with solar hookups, but can splice the 141kWh Rivian battery in, too, for a good chunk of off-grid power.
Like solar panels, also tariffed.
Maybe just force grid-connected solar installations that want credit (any size) and even those that just want to be grid-tied (beyond some small size like maybe 5 panels/2kW worth of MPPT) to use a registering meter that meters net energy for each like 15 min interval (that's the granularity we use in central Europe; I assume the US would have come to a similar choice of granularity), and bills energy according to market rate and appropriately handles connection capacity/transformer capex by like taking a histogram of those individual measurements or otherwise letting a few isolated bursts through while ensuring transformer capacity is paid for by those responsible for the (hypothetical, until it's not) transformer upgrade.
The article seems to leave this important detail out, despite talking a lot about China
0. https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv-global-supply-chains/ex...
EDIT: it looks like the article does mention it, I just missed it:
> The huge surfeit of production capacity in China, which produced about eight out of 10 of the world’s solar modules in 2024
Soon to be just circuses.
Sigh, without the Brooks Brothers "riot", the guy people insulted for talking about climate change would've been president...
Meanwhile the US is full of hubris and can't see beyond their own nose.
"South Korea files WTO complaint over US solar tariffs"
https://www.pv-tech.org/south-korea-challenging-us-solar-tar...
"US DOC issues steep AD/CVD tariffs on Southeast Asian solar cells"
https://www.pv-tech.org/us-doc-issues-ad-cvd-tariffs-on-sout...
The US Department of Commerce (DOC) has issued anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs against solar cell imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia.
"A Casualty of Trump’s Tariffs: India’s Nascent Solar Industry"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/climate/india-solar-panel...
"Solar products from Mexico and Canada slapped with tariffs for first time"
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2025/02/solar-products...
I don’t doubt that another benefit is the current admin just simply doesn’t like solar of course
Heck, the additonal 25% tariff on India for Russian oil imports only came up after Exxon started lobbying to re-enter the Russian market [0], but the Russians sold Exxon's Russian assets to India's ONGC [1].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-18/exxon-say...
[1] - https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/113881/
The full solar supply chain is currently being produced in the US, with low capacity but more planned.
SEIA has a solar and storage supply chain dashboard that they update with operational and planned capacities.
But clearly recent moves by the current admin are undercutting this progress.
Because that (in Rotterdam) is the normal for central Europe these days. Except that they're already in a warehouse/container pile after their ocean voyage.
China shoveled billions into developing solar manufacturing technologies, and as a result they figure out how to cheaply mass-produce solar cells. Solyndra failed because they couldn't compete against the resulting cheap solar cells.
You're measuring success only in with regards to how it might benefit you as a foreigner, but dosen't necessarily mean it was wholly successful for the China.
The treatment of fossil fuels and renewables fits: Block the obviously more economical and better long-term solution in order to shovel money toward the entrenched wealthy. That it sabotages the future due to climate change and economic inefficiency doesn't seem to be a significant factor to them.
I forgot, one of the entrenched corporate wealthy told us that climate change isn't a big deal, and we should send money to his and his friends for solutions.
I'm not anti-business; in fact, quite the opposite: These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone.
The future is pretty much in China now as far as green energy tech and consumption goes. Two bad elections and the US has basically lost world leader status in just over a decade.
Tesla, in particular, boils down to how Americans respond to marketing. We love the idea of buying organic, environmentally-friendly technology that makes us part of the solution. It doesn't matter if Congolese children are dying in the cobalt mines to make EV-grade lithium ion batteries, us Americans need to virtue signal with our wallet. Buy the latest iPhone, save up for a Tesla, it's all part of the new-age jewelry we wear to make ourselves feel worth something.
It was damn good marketing.
To be fair, most CEOs does that, but I think his downfall was really everything that he did besides just over-promising and under-delivering. He could have continued as-is, without all the political stunts and activities, and I'm sure Europeans would still have bought Teslas sometimes. Now the brand is poisoned pretty much world-wide, which wouldn't have happened just because of "over-promise and under-deliver", it takes a lot more for stuff like that to happen.
The equivocation here is quiet something.
> us Americans need to virtue signal how much we love green energy and saving the planet.
Again, more FUD made up by the anti-EV crowd. Most people who buy EVs buy them because they are just better cars. In China, EVs are more of a national security concern: they have to import oil, which exposes them to international conflict. Importing less oil = less exposure, which is a big win for the country. The US has a lot of oil-entrenched interests.
It also goes in lots of other stuff, and is basically a byproduct of Congolese copper production.
The kids are doing artisinal mining because when capitalism doesn't need you to make money, you are pretty fucked. The big mines can make plenty of money with very few workers, leaving no need to build a decent civil society. Something to bear in mind for when our glorious AI future arrives.
Every chance that some countries become the Norway of AI and everyone is rich while others become the resource cursed Congo of AI and a tiny minority become rich and others are left to rot.
Congo is so resource rich, that the state can sustain itself easily with simple, low skilled extraction of resources, without the need to invest in its populace to increase economic output through other, more difficult means.
As for the second paragraph, I mostly agree but nothing you said obviates the virtue signalling that people endlessly associated Tesla with pre-2015. I say this not because I think EVs are bad, but because so much of America's congestive dissonance is rooted in the "Tesla good" aphorism burned into their brain for no reason besides feel-good marketing.
Pre-2015 the best selling EV in America was the Nissan Leaf. Source: https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10567
The only realistic alternative - not "virtue signalling" and instead buying polluting ICE vehicles - is far worse. I'm ok with virtue signalling. It's not like America is going to get walkable cities and world-class public transit anytime before 2060.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic! The inevitable swing towards authoritarianism in the US happened much sooner than I expected, which also means it'll swing back again much sooner too, likely to be way before 2060. I'll throw out a prediction and say that the soon-to-be-authoritarian state that is under construction right now might fall as soon as 2035-2040, and it'll be a wild swing the other way once it happens.
Because you didn't end your sentence with "Plenty of autocracies last forever" but instead you gave them a duration. Maybe that duration sounds long, but it ends eventually, which is exactly my point.
Think more of the earlier end of medieval era, where the peasant class was mostly incapable against feudal armies, even in many cases with massive numbers on their side.
There’s an entire surveillance state, eyes everywhere, gait recognition, massive intelligence networks all at a scale unimaginable by kings and dictators of the past.
There are decades and centuries where authoritarians and dictators prevail. There is no timeline for guaranteeing democracy and human rights will prevail.
It takes action, diligence, and sacrifice to preserve those things. And even more to regain them once lost.
Of course it eventually falls down, everything does. I'm not saying it won't be difficult, nor many people will ultimately die, and the country will be very different. But it will happen, if not sooner, then later, like in every other place in the world.
By defintion, if it “never fell”, it would be one of the authoritarian states we have today, so the obvious lack of any example fulfilling that criteria doesn't demonstrate anything one way or the other.
Now, if you could say something like “point to any authoritarian regime existing after <year> that had existed for longer than <span in years>”, that might tend to support the claim that, at least after a certain point in time, authoritarian regimes tended to have a particular finite lifespan (of course, you can never prove that currently-existing regimes aren’t exceptions to that withot access to future knowledge.)
At one point I had a hypothesis based on a few notable examples that with certain definitional bounds this might work with some point in the 20th century and about 80 years (even had a bit of process explanation, though not a strong theory on why it didn't apply earlier beyond the general spread of democratic ideals) but I never rigourously checked if there might be exceptions.
(Of course, plenty of authoritarian regimes fall only to be replaced by different authoritarian regimes, too.)
I'm definitely ok with 'virtue signalling' though. It's a lot better than vice signalling.
edit the embarrassing
If joining Montana is "success" you've set your sights too low
/s (no offence to Montanans, it's a beautiful state. I just couldn't resist)
I'm also curious about the 'massive insurrection'. Is that like the guy in the frog costume?
That's the guy.
I assume you’re talking about Portland. Speaking as someone who lives in Portland, you’re grossly misinformed. It’s time to change your filter bubble.
i really wish /s wasn't so damn necessary
Both inflate the ego.
Telsa sells a huge number of vehicles to Americans who couldn't care less about the environment but do care about buying a car that can rip through 0-60 in under 3 seconds.
ICE vehicles are simply inferior for most use cases now. They're only holding on because a huge number of people would be out of work if we abandoned obsolete transportation technology. Continuing ICE mass production is an actual socialist make-work scheme at the end of the day.
Love how you were able to take Musk's missteps, layer marketing, and blend in the emotional heart wrenching, think of the (Congolese) children!
Of course, fossil fuels are the ONLY solutions, otherwise you are a victim of marketing or a horrible person for not thinking of (Congolese) children!
If you really care about children at all or any life, first thing would be get off fossil fuels. The right metric is Deaths/TWH: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
However, I won't be buying a Tesla again. I would also not buy another car if I can help it, but I need a car to see family and do relatively long distance tasks.
This more-or-less summarizes American geopolitical and economic attitudes towards China from 1970 until 2016.
"Sure, they're problematic, but so are we, and their product is cheaper, so..."
All the show-stopping problems you mentioned applied to internal combustion before.
Unless electrical generation gets less efficient somehow, the economics are trending back.
That is misleading. First, China wasn't economically productive in 1970, during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn't until the 1990s that things began to subtantially improve, and then take off in the 2000s.
Also, they weren't so problematic - they were a good trading partner, and they were democratizing slowly: They had with a major setback in 1989, but were improving until Xi took over.
Under Xi, it took a few years to see what would happen, which trends were temporary and which were long-term problems; which could be reversed and which would only get worse. I think the problem calcified, in large part, because the US abandoned universal human rights in large part. If the US doesn't advocate that, who will? How can people in China say that freedom is a right and democracy superior if the US doesn't.
I wouldn't drive a Tesla if it was free, I'd just sell it for whatever - that brand is torched for me.
this was never going to happen. the capitalist class are never going to be the ones to get us out of debt; they cause and benefit from it. it's his entire business model.
Not that his own debt isn't going to cause him problems when the TSLA share price stops defying gravity like Wile E. Coyote, it's just that his problems are shaped more like "being a cult leader".
However, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the above paragraph ascribes genius to what is more simply explained by incompetence. It's more likely Musk believed he could make Hyperloop work, but couldn't. Similarly...
- Musk thought he could buy an election and gain the inside track for his companies, but was too witless to maintain good relations with the politician he bought.
- He bought Twitter seemingly on a lark and proceeded to rapidly run it into the ground.
- He put a bunch of script-kiddies in charge of DOGE, which promptly made a mess of an entire government and created a historically massive deficit while gutting government services.
- He alienated the core customer demographics that had formerly been one of Tesla's mains sources of income. (The other being government grants and subsidies which... whoops.)
Now, Tesla's shareholders are weighing whether or not a man with Musk's recent track record is worth a trillion dollar pay package[1]. It's gobsmacking that they even need to think about this.
So, no, Musk is not some evil genius undoing green energy by deliberately creating a false solution that fails to deliver. He's just a garden variety mediocrity who has been promoted far past his capabilities or character and has been utterly undone by the resulting ego trip. He's an object lesson in just how much damage the wrong person in the right place and time can do to the world.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/musk-could-leave...
I think you mischaracterize that deal. It's more if he can hype the stock from $1.3t to $8.5t he gets a 15% cut, in stock. It wouldn't be a bad deal for TSLA speculators.
Is that happening though?
Well as we see in the article, this world is very interconnected and you can't hurt your neighbor without hurting yourself.
But let's look at the structure for a bit...
- Citizens United has allowed unfettered amounts of dark money to flow into our elections, disproportionately benefiting the uber wealthy
- The Senate greatly favors rural states, sometimes 60 - 1 by vote weight
- The House is pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of gerrymandering, where many districts are pretty much unloseable
- Many states purge rolls and make it harder to vote by closing polling places, restricting early access, adding id requirements, and restricting mail in voting. Combined with the fact that election day is on a random Tuesday which we don't take off as a nation to go vote
- Education is... not in a great place. Many many people have _no idea_ how the system works at all, or what's happening within it day to day. But they are getting inundated with 7 second flashes of information and misinformation on infinite feeds which bubble their users, lead them to increasingly extreme content, and make it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction
So yea, he's well understood in that half the country has no idea he's all over Epstein's list and think the felonies he's been charged with are bogus while cheering on the prosecution of Letitia James for renting out an apartment that said she could rent it out in the contract she signed
And we voted for him in the sense that only 7 states seem to matter in our presidential elections, and we're constantly inundated with information about how our votes barely matter cause of all the imbalances in elections at every level
I don't disagree but it seems this time the good economy part only exists in their rhetoric.
The fact that the numbers are going up because of a bubble and a lot of questionable deals is not relevant. That's a problem for someone else to handle later.
The people who get burned there are the ones unwilling / unable to track inflation.
Uh, if it deflates, the numbers go down? Isn't that the definition? The same numerical value of currency represents more value as compared to assets etc - hence things get "cheaper", with the side effect of money getting harder to get
I don't know if you noticed, but the discourse in right-wing politics that's absolutely nothing to do with Chicago school anymore. They don't even bring up free markets.
It's an acknowledgment that the entire economy in the US is cartel or Monopoly
I think that's just the Trump version of the GOP, and the Dems followed along, dismissing economics - an attempt at truth - for shallow partisanship. For example, the New York Times fired their economist columnists, such as Paul Krugman.
This is also voter/public appeasement. There are many rural communities that depend on fossil fuel related jobs and will vote to protect them.
"These policies block a free market and the brilliant new businesses that can thrive and deliver solutions to everyone."
I'd be more inclined to share this view if the manufacturing were done in the US. But we can't really compete on manufacturing costs. Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
It's true to an extent, but technological transitions happen regularly. Everything we have now is a product of a prior transition.
> Remove the policies and the money still goes to the rich and we lose jobs too.
Prices drop, and also the money goes to those who can innovate in the real economy. Manufacturing isn't the only sector of the economy, and we want to build the new sectors and industries, not the ones that were successful 75 years ago.
Yes, and that doesn't refute that people will vote to protect their jobs. If they were offered alternatives, then maybe it would gain more traction in those areas. Eg you can't mine coal anymore but we'll start up a solar panel plant here.
"and we want to build the new sectors and industries"
And what are those? Most of the economy is shit for job seekers right now. We continue to automate and outsource. Right now it looks like nursing and the trades are some of the few things actually growing.
The challenge of being on the leading edge economically (i.e., not being a middle-income country following the road blazed by others), is you don't always know.
Certainly IT, non-GHG energy, ...
Lets hope PG&Es price gouging kicks-off people to look for off-grid solution. EVs have humongous batteries, home batteries are getting pretty cheap. With solar + EV + home battery there is a strong economic case for a large number of people in CA to switch to off grid. Which makes PGE raise rates, driving more people to go off grid. California is a big enough market, which can create this new demand for off grid, new companies and economies of scale.
- Tax imports of panels and batteries
- Tax and oppose new installations.
- Only offer disincetive grid prices to those having panels on their houses. Low pay or negative pay to push to grid, higher cost to consume from the grid.
- Tax installed panels, even off-grid ones.
- Introduce new onerous "safety" requirements.
Imagine you're a US car manufacturer. You see EVs growing around the world, and stagnating in the US. Do you:
(a) Double-down on investments in EVs (billions of USD!), even with a soft US market for EVs, hoping you might compete globally.
(b) Become a parochial, US-only, business hoping to squeeze what you can out of a gradually shrinking industry
When other countries subsidize consumers to buy EVs, and the US does not, it effectively creates a self-own trade barrier for domestic companies.
Examples are the strange Japanese flip phones and the computers with CF card and floppy drives with a 1.5 ghz single core CPU selling for twice the price of a MacBook Pro.
With BYD selling globally now, and Boeing losing its reputation, American vehicles of all sorts are at risk.
You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.
It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.
We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.
The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.
Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.
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