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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Silicon is incredibly common (sand?), but…solar panels require incredibly PURE silicon. Its a complex process to make a solar panel, but the good news is that they keep coming down in price, which results in more people can afford to add them. Its grown every year.
I believe the US should build a solar panel factory. I know they would cost more than the panels from China, but they could use the latest designs and the latest factory methods. There are lots of city, county, state, and federal installations that can use solar panels so there is a steady market, even if they cost a little more.
Anything that is vital for our future should not be made only in China.
Another point is that really, the PV modules themselves are only a small portion of an installed cost on a system.
A 400W solar panel may cost $200, but the cost per panel that gets installed can easily be between $1,000-$1,500 depending on the location.
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.
Profit is often directly opposed to the environment.
Money is invested with the goal of maximizing return on the investment. Lots of green energy projects are profitable, they just don’t provide as much of a financial return as say oil. One example is capturing the methane from garbage dumps to use as a fuel source. It requires around 10 years to pay itself back, and 20 to double the initial investment. That’s only around 3% a year return. Investors would much rather buy up housing instead, where they are making around 10% a year returns.
Cuz Solar panel doesn’t get a lot of energy. Too much space and resources for what it’s worth right now
I don’t see anyone mention that silicon is generally not the limiting factor. Thin film solar panels reduce the majority of silicon needed if that was the issue. It is the rarer elements used to create the photovoltaic cells that are in short supply.
Everyone mocked the solindra failure at the time as an Obama mistake, but their main issue was that China can manufacture solar cheaper than others because they control the mines for things like indium. It is one of the reasons those watching international news are so worried about china’s “investments” in Africa.
While China is going crazy in production, their shorting of the market has been quicksand under other manufacturers and tech development.
I get the impression most people approach this from a technological perspective, but I think economics and the way the market works is a bigger reason why you don’t see this happen.
There was a steady increase in demand for solar panels. This demand could be met by slowly increasing production capacity. Without increased demand, however, there’s no incentive to increase production capacity.
What’s happening now is that there’s a sudden boom in solar panel demand. Production can’t keep up. To increase production capacity this much, new factories need to be built, but that takes time. Productions is thus lagging behind on demand.
You also need precious metals for the chemical process involved in solar panels converting light energy into electrical energy, it isn’t just glass
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.
Sun doesn’t shine 24/7, or not enough when it’s cloudy, and mostly important we have no way to store enough energy to build a lot of solar farms. If you fill a gigantic field with solar panels but in a particularly sunny day the city doesn’t need all that energy or they can’t store it anywhere, you have big problems. The solution is not filling every space possible with solar panels and windmills. It is replacing fossil fuel energy with cleaner energy that can go well with solar and wind energy. This kind of energy sources are hydroelectric and geothermal wherever possible, or nuclear in the other cases.
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