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.
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Others have adequately answered the pure manufacturing side, I’ll address another element.
SP’s can’t be stored forever. They degrade, the connections oxidize, so soon after manufacture they need to be installed if possible to get as much return on investment (ROI) as possible out of them. Panels aren’t exactly perishable, but the older they get the less effectively they work. A whole warehouse full is a lot like a silo full of grain; it won’t go bad overnight, but after a certain period of time it will go bad. It won’t “keep” forever.
Alas, installing is a pain. Lots of people own vast expanses of land, but they want something for it. (Often a VERY inflated number. People price land as much from a point of view of sentimental value as a monetary value.) They’re not going to let you just install your stuff, even if it generates profit. There’s negotiations and picky landowner terms and conditions and “don’t be makin’ ruts across this field, my gran’pappy is rollin’ in his grave already ’bout this and if it gets all tore up by trucks he’ll come out of the ground an’ whup me!” and all that BS. Plus funding the leases, etc.
Then, installers. There’s a fair bit of “anybody in decent health can do it” manual labor, but there are aspects that require skills, and there aren’t tons of those guys sitting at home waiting for work. So, got the panels, finally got the landowner to realize that he’ll make more leasing the land for solar in a year than he’s made farming it in the last 40 years, and now you wait for install crews to finish up their current project and come do it.
The solar panel the factory made last, it might sit in a warehouse waiting a year or more before it’s en route to be installed. By then, it’s already degraded enough that the ROI is already sagging.
The problem isn’t really a shortage of panels. TBH I suspect there’s a few thousand around waiting to be installed. The shortage is in landowners willing to see sense and install crews free to go do the work.
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