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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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.
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