China is worried about global warming. They realised there was only so much they could do themselves. They also realised the rest of the world is just going to bury its heads in the sand.
How can China combat global warming most efficiently? By dumping huge numbers of solar panels (and support equipment) onto the market at cost or below cost.
They don’t need to persuade foreign politicians, they just need to let the people under them attack the problem.
It’s simultaneously a very capitalistic, and communistic solution. Which seems to fit China’s mentality.
This comes down to China not having enough oil, and thus not enough energy. Their domestic oil is only a drop in the buckef of what they need. So they go ham on everything else, demand side and supply side. To lower demand they build subways and trains like crazy. To increase energy supply they build hydro, nuclear, and now solar. Solar is now cheap because they had to focus on it.
They also seemed to realise they can make far more panels than they can deploy. It doesn’t matter where the oil is displaced, so long as it goes down, so will prices.
It’s now a profitable export that the world really needs. But there’s no grand plan, it’s just that China needed a way out of their own energy constraint.
There are some headlines about how China was expecting constant growth of solar panel sales, and they went all out trying to build this future capacity so that they would be able to corner the market…
But they overestimated the speed of the sales growth and built way more manufacturing capacity than the amount the world wants to buy, meaning the whole system is wildly beyond the needed capacity.
I’ve got a pet conspiracy theory.
China is worried about global warming. They realised there was only so much they could do themselves. They also realised the rest of the world is just going to bury its heads in the sand.
How can China combat global warming most efficiently? By dumping huge numbers of solar panels (and support equipment) onto the market at cost or below cost.
They don’t need to persuade foreign politicians, they just need to let the people under them attack the problem.
It’s simultaneously a very capitalistic, and communistic solution. Which seems to fit China’s mentality.
This comes down to China not having enough oil, and thus not enough energy. Their domestic oil is only a drop in the buckef of what they need. So they go ham on everything else, demand side and supply side. To lower demand they build subways and trains like crazy. To increase energy supply they build hydro, nuclear, and now solar. Solar is now cheap because they had to focus on it.
Fully agreed.
They also seemed to realise they can make far more panels than they can deploy. It doesn’t matter where the oil is displaced, so long as it goes down, so will prices.
It’s now a profitable export that the world really needs. But there’s no grand plan, it’s just that China needed a way out of their own energy constraint.
There are some headlines about how China was expecting constant growth of solar panel sales, and they went all out trying to build this future capacity so that they would be able to corner the market…
But they overestimated the speed of the sales growth and built way more manufacturing capacity than the amount the world wants to buy, meaning the whole system is wildly beyond the needed capacity.