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
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
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