Maybe I’ve been playing too much factorio, but if the main ingredient is silicon it seems like we should be easily able to turn out TW worth of solar panels every year.
In: 18
The primary cost of a solar panel is not in the raw materials. It’s in the processing of those into a finished product. The equipment to process everything and assemble a final solar panel is expensive. Scaling it up can reduce costs per panel but they’re still not super cheap.
We can. China is currently doing that very thing, but their government deep into their economy.
Ours is more freelance, and people have to want to buy the solar panels and have them installed. Since it costs money to make them, they usually have to have a reason, like people actively wanting them.
And we’re still not quite to that point. Fossil fuels are still a big part of our power grid.
Factories cost money to build. Factory workers also want to be paid. If you build a US solar panel factory and the panels cost more, nobody will buy them. Chinese solar panel workers get paid a couple dollars a day. US workers won’t accept that.
In the real world there is more than just making sure there are enough belts and trains.
Each process takes time, space, and capital to produce.
Mining the silicon, smelting, crystalizing into wafers, forming it into panels, coating them to reduce reflection, and wiring them all take steps and labor.
Eventually there will be a bottleneck.
Theoretically, it’s possible to do crazy things with manufacturing. It’s been seen in war time economies like during WWII where factories standardized designs, setup their tools to make specific products as fast as possible, and focused all efforts into making ships, planes, rifles, etc.
So if a powerful nation just really wanted to absolutely print them, and had the political will to point a bunch of resources at the problem it’s technically possible. China often will “direct” its economy to produce things it wants. Command economies have their benefits and drawbacks which is an entire other economic discussion. It’s not perfect though, like during WWII when factories retooled to make war materials, consumer good production fell and quality of life suffered, or if the central power makes an inefficient decision you end up producing a bunch of products that simply aren’t needed.
Plus factorio has the benefit of centralized command to vertically integrate the entire process.
Factorio, not enough red science? Well just work on that copper production. You’re in charge of it, you can work that problem.
Real world, not enough circuit boards? Well… unless you make your own factory then you’re kind of just waiting like everyone else. And making a new factory cost money and expertise. Not enough aluminum in real life? Well unless the solar company owns an aluminum mine, the rail company to transport the ore, and the smelter, they can’t really do much besides ask nicely.
We can, and we are. But it’s expensive and takes time. And if we overbuild on production that’s bad.
Generally speaking, before you can even start to build a factory you will need money and permission. Acquiring both of those is already hard.
In order to get the money you need to convince enough people that your factory will turn a profit and they will get their money back and then some. A factory is really expensive. On average they take like…a decade to fully pay back. If we build to many factories each factory will make less money, meaning less people will want to invest.
In addition to funding you also need to get permission. There are a lot of regulatory hurdles. You can’t build a factory everywhere, there are a lot of environmental regulations you need to pass before you can even do that. That process generally takes years.
Great, now you have those two things? How long does it take to build a factory on average? Usually at least 6 months. And then some number of months to test everything.
Now you have a factory. You need to staff it, even a heavily automated floor requires a lot of skilled workers.
But we also build a million other factories, so now the market for solar panels has been flooded and the price has tanked. This factory now has to close it’s doors because it can’t afford to stay open.
We can, but it takes more than raw materials to run a factory. Right now there aren’t enough rich people or governments willing to fund the operation of solar panel factories.
Because capitalism is not very efficient.
Even though we need a lot of solar panels for humanity to survive, it’s too much risk for people with money saved up to use their money to do that instead of keeping making money on oil they know works.
Additionally there is no point in flooding the market with solar panels, if they do the price goes down and they make less money.
Side-note: Capitalist not wanting to make less profit is also why oil prices are so high: https://www.axios.com/2022/03/24/wall-street-oil-execs, there is no motivation for oil production to increase, because over-all the owners would make less money if they did.
Now if you ignore that and look at a semi-planned economy like China, the main limiting factor is that solar panels have a lot of other things and are not just silicon: https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1365/Circ1365.pdf
Byproduct commodity |Primary commodities |World refinery productione (in metric tons) |Price of refined metal, (in dollars per kilogram)
—|—|—|—
Cadmium |Zinc |3,4 16,000 |6
Gallium |Aluminum, zinc |3 111 |570
Germanium |Zinc, coal5 |140|6 1,490
Indium |Zinc |3 570 |685
Selenium |Copper |3,7 3,000–3,500 |71
Tellurium |Copper |450–500 |211
And it takes a lot of effort (and often a lot of energy), to refine these metals, meanwhile the world is still churning out iPhones and the such, so the commodities and energy are not cheap as that effort could also be used to make over-priced phones
The main ingredient isn’t just “silicon” it’s something called polysilicon which is pretty much extremely purified silicon. The process to create polysilicon is quite expensive and energy consuming and is one of the main limiting factors to mass PV manufacture (among others).
It should be noted that this is already happening. Solar continues to get better and produced more cheaply (or at least it was until covid and high inflation hit). And the technology will continue to improve which will allow us to make it even better and more cheaply. However, this takes time and money, so the improvements made thus far haven’t happened immediately and they won’t happen immediately moving forward.
You can and they did in China, however they did it to such an extent that the profit margin on panels is now very low so companies are reluctant to invest more in capacity.
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