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
Short answer: If we aren’t building factories to build more solar panels despite demand, it’s because no one with the money to do so believes they’ll get a sufficient return on that investment, for a wide variety of reasons.
Long answer:
In Factorio, literally everything is automated. Mining? Automated. Smelting ore into usable raw material? Automated. Turning raw materials into intermediate/finished goods? Automated. And depending on your circuit network, fine tuning production to meet demand can also be automated. Or maybe you’re just relying on buffer chests. Or maybe you’ve got a sushi belt. Or heaven forbid, a sushi belt with cars on it. But once you get it set up, it’s all automated.
In the real world, that automated mining machine is actually an entire workforce mining shit. And when they think they’ve found a good vein of new stuff to mine, it might be decades of legal battles just to be able to mine it.
Your row of smelters? That’s actually a gigantic metalworks facility that might have taken a decade to construct.
Your automated factories? That’s thousands or tens of thousands of skilled workers. Except some of it’s just labor intensive work that can be done by asshole off the street, but it’s tedious as fuck. Which is why something like half of solar panels are built by slave labor in China. No one’s figured out how to automate yet.
Cost actually matters. When people say “It’s not economically feasible”, there’s a whole god damn lot that goes into that statement. It’s not just “hurr durr stocks”. It’s availability and cost of goods and labor, in relation to what you can get for selling finished goods, in conjuction with positive or negative effects from government regulation, the ability/will of NGO’s to bring public pressure, and whatever else might affect the cost.
Also, every step above is going to involve lengthy negotiations with local/county/state/federal governments, and some asshole is probably going to derail the entire project with environmental regulations, by ‘finding’ some endangered species in the land you bought to do any of this on.
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