Climate in the 21st Century

Why the US Wants a Piece of China’s Solar Business

5,469 views Sep 22, 2023
Solar panels will be the main source of renewable energy in 2030, and they’re mostly made in China. For the United States, the accelerating pace of the climate crisis has quickly turned this industrial reality into a strategic threat.

US President Joe Biden and Congress have allocated billions of dollars to put solar panels on homes and factories and in fields. But when it comes to gaining ground on manufacturing solar hardware, Beijing has a 20-year headstart.

With Climate Week and COP28 looming, Bloomberg’s reporters and analysts analyze America’s prospects in this critically important piece of the energy transition.

DIY-HP-LED said:

Why the US Wants a Piece of China’s Solar Business

5,469 views Sep 22, 2023
Solar panels will be the main source of renewable energy in 2030, and they’re mostly made in China. For the United States, the accelerating pace of the climate crisis has quickly turned this industrial reality into a strategic threat.

US President Joe Biden and Congress have allocated billions of dollars to put solar panels on homes and factories and in fields. But when it comes to gaining ground on manufacturing solar hardware, Beijing has a 20-year headstart.

With Climate Week and COP28 looming, Bloomberg’s reporters and analysts analyze America’s prospects in this critically important piece of the energy transition.

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Hopefully the US has been stealing Chinese technology as much as they've been stealing theirs and some of those billions can be used to get factories built, put more people paying taxes to work in better than blue collar jobs and we can all put solar panels on our roofs that have a Proudly Made in the U.S.A. sticker on them!

I'm so fed up with everything I buy having a Made in China sticker I have to peel off.

OldMedUser said:

Hopefully the US has been stealing Chinese technology as much as they've been stealing theirs and some of those billions can be used to get factories built, put more people paying taxes to work in better than blue collar jobs and we can all put solar panels on our roofs that have a Proudly Made in the U.S.A. sticker on them!

I'm so fed up with everything I buy having a Made in China sticker I have to peel off.

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I’ll settle for proudly made in any of the G7.
Living rural/exurban, I’m very ambivalent about Amazon. Sometimes it’s the only easy way to get chotchkes that otherwise would mean a 100+-mile drive. But I’m tired of seeing some weird Chinese brand (or a known Western brand who now manufacture in China) with the invariable four-something-star review with the fat tail of one-stars that chronicle serious quality/durability issues.

OldMedUser said:

Hopefully the US has been stealing Chinese technology as much as they've been stealing theirs and some of those billions can be used to get factories built, put more people paying taxes to work in better than blue collar jobs and we can all put solar panels on our roofs that have a Proudly Made in the U.S.A. sticker on them!

I'm so fed up with everything I buy having a Made in China sticker I have to peel off.

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You will see less of it for critical things, but for consumer shit it should stay the same. It's more about China not having us by the balls if things go south, so it's batteries and solar panels made at home, here and in the EU. Over the next decade solar and batteries will be essential to going green, solar is the cheapest form of power generation and it will get cheaper, it can be used in Canada too, if done right. We will need better cheaper batteries though and the battery factories for EVs are going up all over the place, eventually home power storage costs will come down due to mass production and probably over production for the EV market. Solar roofs will look like normal roofs more too, and panels won't be seen much on domestic rooftops, replaced by solar shingles and tiles. In Canada we will probably use grid power generated by NG running gas turbines in winter more, but they shouldn't have to run much with enough battery storage on the grid and distributed domestically.

If you were off grid and had to use a 10-kilowatt generator, you would only need to run it for a couple of hours every day or less, if it charged up your solar battery while running in the dead of winter when the solar panels were covered with snow. Batteries would mean running a generator a lot less and could last for days depending on your energy use in the dead of winter, heat with wood and you might not use much power at all.

Combine a 20k or 30kWh battery with a gas generator then we will be talking about backup power! The generator would only come on when the battery got low, recharge it and then shut off, if solar charged the battery, the generator should rarely come on except in winter after snow covers the solar panels. I could see something like that being popular with the off-grid types here in Canada, getting poles run to a rural property costs a fortune better spent on solar and storage these days. A wood stove and generator could get many off the grid through some parts of the winter if they had a backup generator charging their solar batteries. For those building a rural home far from the grid, this would probably be the best option and one getting more practical by the year.

Maybe you'll see these spring up on farms, sold as kits, one or two of these and the barn roof covered in solar panels should keep an electrified farm going when good batteries get cheap enough. No fuel costs would mean a lot to farmers and untie food costs from oil costs, farmers also like independence and rural power rates are often quite high.

In one sense he's right, provide the water and the trees will grow themselves. Trees, plants in general sequester carbon and clean the air of pollutants. Bill is not anti-tree, but trees alone won't solve the problem, not dumping millions of years' worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere might help though.

China is taking care of smaller countries by keeping prices down for solar and soon batteries and EVs, until America and the EU catch up. China will be selling more than EVs, they will be selling solar kits for houses with a home battery, plug and play. In equatorial countries or those close to the equator it would be easy to power a home with a low cost 10kW solar roof top kit including an inverter and battery pack with several options for storage. Such systems could be used a lot further north and south though.


KEY POINTS

• “Republicans for climate change action are gold,” said Bill Gates, the billionaire climate philanthropist and investor, on Thursday at the Climate Forward event hosted by The New York Times in New York City.
• The Inflation Reduction Act was passed along entirely party lines. If Republicans take Washington D.C. and bring an end to the pipelines of funding for climate investment that the IRA opened, the progress that the United States has made and is making hangs in the balance.
• That matters because it takes decades of investment to really get these new industries to scale. And less wealthy countries need rich countries to scale up and bring the cost down of clean solutions, said Gates.

There are more reasons to go green than reducing carbon emissions, energy independence has its own value, both for countries and individuals. In a decade EVs should reduce or even eliminate gasoline consumption in some countries, all countries will be using less of it and America could get to the point where domestic production was enough for domestic consumption. If half the cars on the road in 10 years are EVs, that should half the gas consumption and some countries will have many more than half of the light vehicles on the road as EVs. OPEC should be feeling the pain in a decade as EVs take over light transport and electric power begins to encroach on other transportation like shipping and trucking. Hardly anybody will be generating power with oil or natural gas in 20 years, except in emergencies to top up batteries. People in Canada and Europe might need to supplement solar for periods in winter.

I expect OPEC's bargaining position to weaken over the next decade or two as EVs and renewables take over and members will scramble to sell what they can as soon as they can. In 20 years sitting on oil might be as worthless as sitting on coal is now.

Big Oil, Big Lies and Big Al...

14,431 views Sep 24, 2023
World leaders just gathered at the UN in New York to discuss the climate, ahead of the main COP 28 climate conference coming up in November 2023. The president of that event is also the CEO of one of the world's largest oil and gas producers. So how, in the name of all things holy, can we possibly expect to make any progress there? This video has a couple of suggestions.

OPECs power over America would be eliminated by just half of the country converting to EVs along with other countries going further, their markets would soon be in trouble. Gasoline is a global business and if the EU North America and China along with other places go EV, it will mean a lot less gas sold, even if America is slow to catch up to some other places on EVs. Increasing solar, wind and storage along with heat pumps will also mean less demand for heating/diesel/jet fuel, as less is used to generate electricity and heat houses. Rail electrification would also mean big savings in diesel fuel as would electrifying trucks and charging their batteries on the fly with pantographs and overhead wires along a quarter to a third of main route distances. Electric trucks will mean driverless trucks without a dozen gears to go through, that and other economic benefits to owners might see it happen.

It all adds up to diminishing power and money for OPEC over the next couple of decades and we should start to see the results of the change in about a decade.

DIY-HP-LED said:

In 20 years sitting on oil might be as worthless as sitting on coal is now.

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Oil has a lot more uses than burning it so tho it's value may drop a lot it is still useful and what's left should last forever. Fertilizers, dyes, etc tho with plastics made from petroleum being phased out slowly the demand will drop even more. It's the huge immediate profits that won't be available so the oil companies should be turning their investments into renewables as they should have been all along and maybe we wouldn't be in the mess they have created.

They knew about this problem 50 years ago and if they had of been responsible corporate entities instead of filthy, greedy capitalists they would have been helping create the greener world we so desperately need trillions of dollars to create. Now we're going to have to sue them blind to get some of the money that would have a good investment strategy for them. Long term gain without the pain they will be soon feeling.

Things like hemp plastics that Henry Ford used on his early cars is the way to go for lots of plastic replacement. Fiberglass needs to be phased out as well. I only recently became aware of how much worse than plastic it is in the marine environment where it is used extensively. Who knew.

OldMedUser said:

Oil has a lot more uses than burning it so tho it's value may drop a lot it is still useful and what's left should last forever. Fertilizers, dyes, etc tho with plastics made from petroleum being phased out slowly the demand will drop even more. It's the huge immediate profits that won't be available so the oil companies should be turning their investments into renewables as they should have been all along and maybe we wouldn't be in the mess they have created.

They knew about this problem 50 years ago and if they had of been responsible corporate entities instead of filthy, greedy capitalists they would have been helping create the greener world we so desperately need trillions of dollars to create. Now we're going to have to sue them blind to get some of the money that would have a good investment strategy for them. Long term gain without the pain they will be soon feeling.

Things like hemp plastics that Henry Ford used on his early cars is the way to go for lots of plastic replacement. Fiberglass needs to be phased out as well. I only recently became aware of how much worse than plastic it is in the marine environment where it is used extensively. Who knew.

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A long time ago I read the metaphor that using petroleum as fuel was like burning Cognac to stay warm.

This is g

DIY-HP-LED said:

I noticed that at the grocery store, prices have doubled for olive oil.

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This is fucking serious in the sense that this all started in Spain last summer and most of the oil is produced by small family owned groves that only harvested small amounts basically, and now the children are giving up and are trying to sell their farms to no avail.
This is going to affect a lot of people that like salads with dressing and even the restaurants you dine at.
Who knows if they can recover from this seemingly never ending drought.
All I can say is good luck or my oil & vinaigrette will just be a fond memory.

cannabineer said:

A long time ago I read the metaphor that using petroleum as fuel was like burning Cognac to stay warm.

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I bet that would smell a lot better.

What is "controversial" about it, there are those who accept science and reality and then there are fools who are detached from reality or believe bullshit. If you want to survive you need to deal with facts and react to them, not sleepwalk over a cliff or be led there by a fool, blinded by hate and bigotry.

DIY-HP-LED said:

What is "controversial" about it, there are those who accept science and reality and then there are fools who are detached from reality or believe bullshit. If you want to survive you need to deal with facts and react to them, not sleepwalk over a cliff or be led there by a fool, blinded by hate and bigotry.

Set of controversial billboards erected across US spark heated debate: ‘The public needs to understand’

The boards feature a large map of the country.

news.yahoo.com

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Perhaps it would keep the right billionaires from getting richer yet.

cannabineer said:

Perhaps it would keep the right billionaires from getting richer yet.

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Just transferring oil company subsidies to renewables would way more than pay for the entire conversion to renewables. We should pace ourselves a bit though as new technology comes on stream and prices continue to drop for solar and batteries of all descriptions and the kinds of batteries available is rapidly increasing. We Used Li-ion tech and improved it for decades and only recently started using LFP batteries, over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of options coming to market with more on the way, all of them will go through generations of incremental improvement. They can make nearly fireproof Li-ion cells now that, perform better in cold and hot, charge fast and last longer simply by changing the electrolyte formula and there is a company marketing that formula now to Li-ion battery makers.

DIY-HP-LED said:

Just transferring oil company subsidies to renewables would way more than pay for the entire conversion to renewables. We should pace ourselves a bit though as new technology comes on stream and prices continue to drop for solar and batteries of all descriptions and the kinds of batteries available is rapidly increasing. We Used Li-ion tech and improved it for decades and only recently started using LFP batteries, over the past couple of years there has been an explosion of options coming to market with more on the way, all of them will go through generations of incremental improvement. They can make nearly fireproof Li-ion cells now that, perform better in cold and hot, charge fast and last longer simply by changing the electrolyte formula and there is a company marketing that formula now to Li-ion battery makers.

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with a Republican House?