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you had many euphemism against the Chinese manufacturer as well, but in civilized manner. Business is business. If they want to blame of Chinese gov subsidy, they can subsidy their own industry as well. Every government gives subsidy in many different forms, including feed-in-tariff.
An important event that helped Chinese companies was the spike in silicon prices a little over 10 years ago. Japanese and western companies invested billions into thin film solar cells (which use less silicon), while China kept using the "old" and more expensive technology. When silicon suppliers increased their production, silicon prices suddenly dropped making Chinese solar panels a lot cheaper. Japanese manufacturers wasted precious resources into a technology that wasn't needed anymore and couldn't afford investing more into expanding production capacity. The rest is history.
You really have to question the wisdom of these companies splurging on research not on developing a better and cheaper panel, but to save silicon. Silicon is just sand. The bottleneck on sand products is entirely an artificially created one that won't last forever.
@@georgedang449 Keep in mind that major silicon suppliers were just 3 companies (2 of which Japanese) at the time (it was a very small market mostly for microchips), so it probably made sense, seeing the high price silicon was fetching back then. Chinese solar companies were probably aware that massive new silicon supply was being scaled up in China and that the bottleneck was only temporary.
@@georgedang449 they may had went the wrong way but the knowledge they learnt from the research is never useless. It's simply not as useful for now, but it will serve as a step for human to move forward in the future.
@@mira-rara Perhaps another time, on another planet, where sand is rare. But I doubt these companies will be around by then. The Japanese solar industry as a whole is already 6 feet under for contributing useless sand saving methods to humanity's collective knowledge.
@@georgedang449 The method to create those can be referenced in other thin film technology, which we used alot in our daily life. Technology in PV isn't limited to PV only, the science knowledge we obtained can be applied in other ways. Not to mention it's not always optimal to use alot of silicon, in some application it may not be possible to use a thick PV.
You have not mentioned the most important point: China has a Hugh domestic market. China has installed the most amount of panels in the world. It supported those Chinese companies even without export.
Plus silica is so cheap that there should be no reason for it to be expensive. China charge for materials and labor while rest of the world over charged. The technology is simple and anyone can do it. They just have the best price. They supply the world
I think you’re glossing over the fact the world trade phase of this was in the 90’s and back then no one in China, India, or any other “developing” nation was even thinking of buying a solar panel. So at that time the export was all there was and it was critical.
The research for the Chinese panels was done at the University of New South Waḻes Australia and on the team was a Chinese student who approached the Australian government for $10 Million to start manufacturing and was knocked back. He approached the Chinese government and was given $100 Million.. Hence Australia AGAIN lost the chance to be a player in this industry. Australia incidentally has the highest ratio of people using solar panels on the planet.
I did not even expect that German industry would produce solar cells in the long term. But I'm quite happy that Germany helped to create a market, motivating Chinese companies to scale up production. The amount of subsidy seemed a little crazy at the time, and now I'm proud we did it, as it was more useful than I expected.
@@TheHighborn The most important factor that germany lost were political decisions. Less subsidies and hinderances. E.g. solar grew very fast, way faster than expectations, and became dangerous to the coal industry. Thus politics put a cap of a few gigatons per year in place and if that cap was exceeded the following years less solar would be build. Politics like this destroyed the german solar industry, not expensive labor or tech viability. Even today Germany is suffering from stupid decisions that hindered faster adoption of renewables. I think the most stupid thing I saw so far was the 10H rule (look it up)... Well, now people are paying on average 10 Cent per kWh more than last year and Germany was already one of the most expensive countries when it came to energy... For some reason 25% of people would still vote for the party that governed for 16 years and was at fault for this disaster but well, at least we finally got a government change last election.
One thing you neglect to discuss was the crash and consolidation of the China solar indistry. We always hear about how this or that EU or US solar company crashed (usually blamed on China), but seldom about the blood-letting in China. Suggested topic!
30k sounds like not enough. The German ministry for Energy listed 150k jobs in the solar industry in 2013 but only 50k in 2021. The decline was wayyy steeper
@@paxundpeace9970 it wasn't the lack of subsidies but the abrupt cut of those. if the subsidies would have been phased out over some years the companies could have adopted, but 🤷 many things point at more or less influences by big German energy conglomerates that at this point still mostly produced by burning fossil fuels.
Then it would go down to the political system. The Chinese systems are always based on efficiency Just one example, China has only one time zone. Think about it how efficient it with be compare with 5 time zones that US has. If that is not troublesome. Add day-light saving time... think about it!
Another huge factor has to do with solar grade silicon manufacturing. With the price going from $35/kg to over $300, as you mentioned in passing, how that came back down to a reasonable price is important. This huge factor of 10 price signal in a high production material science area would create a massive expansion in the capacity as fast as it could be built. However, in Europe, the US, and Japan/Korea these facilities require permissions from hundreds of agencies, environmental impact reports, etc., and even considering a "greenfield" massive expansion for a billion-dollar class facility takes decades to obtain all the approvals. These are massive manufacturing facilities and a bit of a cross between iron production and chemical plants with hazardous materials and just huge scale. The producers in the US, Europe, and outside China could only really expand existing facilities and couldn't get permissions for new facilities on a reasonable time scale in an expanding market. My understanding was that China build a 1.5 billion dollar facility in less than 1.5 years (about right without permission and regulatory issues) and paid for that facility in the first 6 mo of production profits. When supply caught up with demand, the question would be who got the silicon at a reasonable price first and it wouldn't be Germany or US with all their silicon expansion plans still working on environmental impact reports and hiring lobbyists. Too little, too late.
One should note however, that this focus on environmental paperwork is probably the reason Europeans don't have to wear masks against pollution when outdoors (excluding the recent few years' issues, of course)
In some part of China, it was reported that in July 2020, the solar energy price can be as low as 0.016 USD/kWh and on average about 0.062USD/kWh. The cost had reduced by 80% since 2012, according to a Chinese report. I guess that is why the Chinese leader dared to declare to reach carbon neutralization by 2060, despite a huge manufacturing industry usage of energy.
@@lolpolitics3363 As was pointed out in this presentation, solar panels are not the highest cost item - that would go to the inverter, plus installation.
I did a Ph.D. in low-cost solar silicon manufacturing and also have a startup from my Ph.D. It is true that the solar module supply chain is extremely competitive and China is definitely leading the way. Thank you for the informational video
How do you have a startup from your PhD? I wasn't planning on doing a PhD, but if that's a way to break into business... I can't figure this out and I have no mentor.
@@fusion9619 Just do it....you studied to get the knowledge and expertise now put it to use..............just thinking about doing it is a recipe for a non event coming to YOUR neighborhood very soon.
@@universalexplorer4023 A PhD is very unspecific, in terms of topic and what the company does. But when you got a PhD done, chances are higher that you get the work for the company done. Which is a lot. There is not much relation between PhD in general and starting a business. What he says is that his specific PhD had a result that was useful to start his specific company.
@@fusion9619 The way to do it is pretty simple really. You spend a few years living off savings or investments as you advertise yourself and undercut the competition to get a few landmark jobs, which you then use in networking and advertising. I used the cash from a 4 year military contract (cushy job as a support lieutenant, foreign deployments for cash) to basically live off while also spending weekends excersizing as a reservist to sustain myself. Being an entrepreneur gets a lot easier if you don't need a salary for over a year. What you need to work out though is what you do, and what you don't. My biggest mistake was adapting to suit people's needs, so we ended up claiming to be specialised in everything. We work property development, and since we advertised that we don't design, we don't build, we coordinate building and we don't work for governments, things have been much simpler since everybody knows what we do. As opposed to a confusing "But we also do that, and also that and also that, and that"
@@williamPwarner I guess you mean Uygurs. They are mostly less educated and less willing to word hard. It's less likely to force those Muslims working hard to beat Germans.
The german manufacturing equipment supplier you are talking about is „Meyer Burger“. They shifted their strategy last year and stopped selling their next gen solar manufacturing equipment. They use it themselves to produce high efficiency panels in Germany starting in June 2021.
I'm not really sure if that is the wisest idea. Especially if they don't move the production to cheaper countries, or do some VERY good innovation in this field. We will see I guess. I would rather buy German than Chinese that's for sure. :)
@@LannisterFromDaRock I don't understand how Germany manufactures anything at all with high labour costs, but they do, so maybe solar will be the same. Long warranty will help compete against cheaper products.
@@jon8864 As far as I know, the panels are planned to work for 25 years. Even the Chinese ones. You don't need a longer time than that because innovation in the field will render everything useless in that timeframe. Also, the panels have no moving parts, so I can imagine that fault rates are already pretty low. I wish the best for the Germans on this, but manufacturing commodity items with good margins is very tricky.
There are always winners and losers in business. The cheaper solar becomes, the more PVs installer, the better for all of us, regardless of who is better at manufacturing and selling them.
@@kashay4415 Do you think China has a future in manufacturing? The world has seen the low level of intelligence in China, after seeing videos of hasmat-suited idiots spraying empty streets, testing fish for Covid, wrapping prisoners in duct tape and taking them away.
It's understandable to put up tariffs to protect domestic production, but it's sad considering how fossil fuels are subsidized here in the US. It would have been nice for the west to have subsidized domestic solar instead... At least the tariffs are set to expire soon
I think s trump save d. The coal job s. Giving million s of solar job s to China soft power goes along with it 4years is. This ever raised on radio program ect ect ect
US does subsidize renewables, a lot of subsidies in fact. The issue isn’t just inadequate renewables energy generation, but inadequate infrastructure in transmission, transportation and storage as well. Also for whatever reason, Americans denounce nuclear and geothermal.
If living in Germany, you will see that so-called german efficiency is a hoax. I don't say germans are bad and low-skilled. It's just that this efficiency is overrated. Case in point: Berlin Airport. Another case in point: manually typing Covid cases between government agencies, with fax machine. Another case: Tesla complained about german bureaucracy.
@@oceanwave4502 lol do you know that in Netherlands to be vaccinated you have to receive letter, in many developing countries you have online form that you fill and your doctor will call you when to go or you will receive mail.
@@oceanwave4502 That a prick like Elon Musk complains if it does not work like he wants is not new. He turned into a Karen (not recently but more obviously recently) 😂 But you are right, the efficiency might be overrated, but it's because everything has to be well thought and perfect and under these premises it can't be that efficient. Sometimes it would be better to improvise and sometimes the perfection is absolutely right... For example: Wooden rails from the hardware store in a 50000 $ Tesla ?!?
@@erictoo1035 you know all China did with those trains is get foreign parts and rebrand them. They didn't develop anything at all. They just put parts together which all mechanical parts are foreign made
@@kaitoshinichi guess they're following the same path as USA and Japan, once they start creating new unique technologies rather than relaying on value added from cheap labour only then will they start giving a rat's ass about conforming to IP regulations.
I remembered the compromise was reached for the anti-dumping for solar panels because China threatened to retaliate by blocking European companies to participate in China’s 4G rollout. That would kill both Ericsson and Nokia.
@@TheBooban It's not 1%. Those two regularly get 1/3 or 2/3 of the bid for telecom equipment in China -- mind you, Chinese telecom companies are all state-owned.
@@TheBooban First, typo, 1/4 or 1/3. The articles you can search for them and see for yourself. And no to your question. **Your notion of "build" is deeply flawed.** I specifically said bid for telecom equipment. For example, selling a switch is not deploying a switch, is not integrating it into a grid, is not maintaining a grid.
When I was younger, the Solar industry was seen as the future technology that would help pull post-industrial cities out of their misery by providing new manufacturing jobs. Sad to see how that went.
You should not be sad but be happy to see the green future comes much easier and earlier because of China. A single city workers’ lost is way to small comparing the the gain of the whole human race.
@@xuhuadaniel3810 Yes, that is a rational standpoint from the Chinese perspective. After all, it's China's whole business strategy to produce goods cheaper than in other countries, which means that you get the benefits of both the jobs and the money from exporting the products, leaving the other countries as cash cows full of unemployed people. However, Chinese PVs aren't much cheaper than western ones, the advantage is quite narrow. Meanwhile, Chines PVs are produced at much lower environmental standarts than western ones, leading to them having a much higher carbon footprint. From that perspective it certainly wasn't to the benefit to the whole planet.
Big oil said no and fought back. Only a government that is not controlled by billionaires and big business can say... lets enter the future even if it means discarding the billion dollar business of today. This is why China can do this.
One of the reasons the subsidies were cut is the following: paying people for putting solar cells on their roofs benefits exactly one type of people: those who own a property AND are already well off. Even though subsidised during energy production, there is a lot of upfront cost which poorer households can't affort. Never mind those which don't even own a property themselves or are in an apartment building. So essentially it was just an amazing investment vehicle for those with money to burn. That didn't sit well with a lot of the population in Germany.
It goes much further Those with enough starting capital at that time and a house to put solar on where given contracts for decades granting them more €/W put into the grid then the average price of energy. It doesn’t take a rich person more than 2 seconds to understand that you can hook up your neighbors power line to yours, putting in their energy pull as your output as “solar energy” , thereby generating “free” money, which was then split between rich guy and neighbor. This still goes on to this date, also the ones that bought solar cells back then bought the cheapest Chinese ones with low efficiency and lower lifespan , so they didn’t even generate at least some energy to make up for their constant burning of resources. Guess who pays for the net profit generated by selling the same energy back to the system for more money? The tax payers that were already to broke to get solar back then in the first place. Thanks Green Party , they had one job and killed German solar thereby forcing exclusive production under much worse conditions for the climate.
Norway's oil fund invested huge amount of money in chinese solar panels technology, same with apple, Tesla, google and many other tech companies. One day the oil industry will be mostly gone, but capital created by the oil industry will still make money. They buy shopping centers in other countries. I think they own a business street in London.
A good documentary, thanks for your efforts. But on 19:22 the narrator said: "And the (Chinese) government has been responding a little bit, growing their installed solar capacity across the country." Actually China installed 49,655 MW new solar PV capacity in 2020 (254,355 MW in total), which is 37% of worldwide capacity (35.6% in total), and more than EU, America and Japan combined. I'd not say that's "a little bit".
The guy is anti-China, he will hardly give the credit in the right way to that country to the point of useing any word or detail to minimize any of China's achievements.
All of the recent videos showing Zero Covid lockdown scenes in Shanghai (testing fish, spraying empty streets, drones flying around telling people to "control your soul's desire for freedom) have destroyed everybody's belief that the Chinese have the intelligence to compete with the world in scientific progress.
A couple points. Raw materials going into making the pure polysilicon comes from China from my understanding and for what doesn't come from there, most the rest comes from Russia. Once China got good at producing the material needed for the panels, it was THEIR efforts that caused the prices to drop so much because they didn't charge those huge profit margins. So frankly it was Chinese companies that allowed solar to be so affordable like it is now. Western businesses were too busy making insane profit margins. As was pointed out, Chinese companies improved the equipment involved in the manufacturing process which also allowed costs to come down, so pretty much everything about how good the panels are now along with the low cost, if you're outside the US and don't have to pay a stupid ass 25% tariff thanks to Trump and Biden which has slowed the growth of solar installs, is brought to you by Chinese R&D What allowed the Chinese solar industry to do well during the Great Recession is the govt did a lot of investing in bringing solar energy to different parts of China. In fact the Chinese govt. has done more investing into green energy like wind and solar than any other govt. in the world. Some may say this is unfair, but I don't see how a country investing in its own infrastructure is unfair. It's smart. Solyndra had a TOTALLY different business model. Because of the cost of polysilicon continually going up as the companies involved in its production kept pushing prices higher, Solyndra was using other materials to produce solar panels. They would have been successful if the Chinese companies didn't get involved. The cost for that material, polysilicon dropped by 90% within about a 1 - 2 year time frame. So because Chinese companies came in and helped to greatly reduce the cost of this raw material needed for the panels, the panels Solyndra were making which DIDN'T use polysilicon couldn't compete. So bravo to the many Chinese efforts in solar technology along with cost controls in the supply chain. It was THEIR efforts that have allowed the huge growth in solar energy, and nothing western companies were doing, which were mostly focused on maximizing their profit margins and trying to get every last bit of incentive dollars coming from the different govts. Their demise was them not trying to compete but instead always focusing on high profit margins. The main thing the Chinese govt. did was put money into R&D, which is the same thing western govts. do, along with ensuring there was large growth in solar energy in China to help their industries, and this isn't unfair either. Their govt. has no rules about the govt. being independent of business. To me, I think Western govts. need to rethink their separation between business and govt, the US ESPECIALLY because they've cut so much money from R&D that it's harder to compete against most Asian businesses where their govts. will put money where they see it's best used. Now, what China does from time to time is out of line with the tenets of the WTO so personally I don't feel China belongs in the WTO, but that's another topic.
Anyway, the reason is that Chinese government really wants cheaper solar cost. Just have a look at the stats from 2013 to 2018, they have real demand for solar energy.
Cause Chinese people were literary dying from air pollution. The chinese worker productivity was being affected. Something had to be done. Coal plants and ICE cars had to go.
Hey, thanks. Keep up the good work. Your video explained why Chinese panels overtaken German panels, a question which baffled me for a long time. However, I am still baffled why solar energy become a thing THIS time around while I didn't see any major technical breakthrough. And I've been around for a long time and witness hype over solar energy 2-3 times before this round.
Take a look at this. What Is Wright's Law | Learning Curve of Innovation ark-invest.com/wrights-law/ It is the same reason that will make electric cars cheaper than gas cars.
There's another reason or two, Harvey, that I didn't go into earlier because I was on my iPad. 1) we have small gas peaker plants now. 2) we have decent megabatteries now and they are only going to get bigger, better, and cheaper. Thank you, consumer electronics! Thank you, electric cars! Megabatteries can replace (and are already replacing) some of the peaker plants. In the long run, we might be able to get rid of all of them. 3) we have better and cheaper power electronics now. We have transistors that work with much higher voltages and much higher currents. They are *really* useful for EVs but they are also *really* useful for turning photovoltaic power into DC for battery charging or into 110 (120)/220 (240) volt AC for the grid -- or for going from grid power to DC battery charging power. The losses are much smaller now and they are much more reliable. They are *also* really useful for transforming electricity up/down, even without using AC. That means we can start using HVDC cables instead of HVAC -- the losses in HVDC are smaller, especially if they are in the ground or under water. 4) we have small, cheap computers everywhere + we have internet everywhere. That makes it easy to keep track of more details of the grid in real-time + it makes it realistic to turn off certain loads in a smart way when the total load on the grid is too high. Perhaps there are big freezers that can be turned off for a while with no harm, for example.
What I can relate is that when regulations in Brazil allowed grid-tie installations for everyone it boomed a entire new market. Most of our country is excellent for solar production, and if the government were more competent they would subdise that so many would have a better and greener power plant.
BP used to have a solar panel plant in Sydney Australia in the 1990s. I have 20 of these panels still up on the roof and after 25 years they still operate at about 75% rated capacity. The plant closed in the early 2000s and the equipment sent to China.
The equipment weren't gifted to China. Likewise, they came to US, bought some old steel mill equipment, modified and upgraded, then produced competitive products. The US mills were glad to sell those machines, otherwise they would have rusted and junked. I can still show you rusted equipment in my state.
Yep!. BP once made solar panels and did so for quite some years. BP announced in 2011 it was getting out of the solar module market, due to increasing competition and thinning margins. Owners like you still with BP Panels report even on the coldest winter day their BP solar panels are still producing
Much easier to look forward centuries when you don't have election pressures. Long term plans are nice but the results can take a while to materialize. In that time frame, average citizens who don't know as much sees nothing happening. Nothing is happening In the moment and out you go.
No, CCP subsidy the Chinese solar companies so they can lower to a ridiculous price that all non Chinese companies can't survive and they will bring back up the price when there are only Chinese companies left
Quaterly profits and election cycles; blinding long term vision for its citizen. We currently have former Republicans lobbying for Chinese firms on the banned list.
Even a few years ago, investors would shy away from the solar industry in China, for the competition is just too fierce and each company, even the largest one run risk of bankruptcy everyday. China started at the middle of the chain, which is more labor intensive, and wt low barrier to entry. Yet they need to buy machines and raw materials that were expensive, but sell at low prices as a result of competition. So many companies failed, I remember I once visited a solar co. for due diligence, as they aimed to IPO, didn’t succeeded, and the company went bankrupt 2 years ago.
It is just the way commodity markets work. That is why you can have massive 500 euro tv's nowdays and mobile phones cost a couple of bucks. Someone has to pay for those low prices.
Very nice video .it isn’t easy to collect so much information from a different language.thank you.it seems technology industry is something more complex than technology itself .
When a show like this (known for covering a diverse range of topics) covers your industry or area of expertise, you usually come away pretty disappointed. But in this case, I am blown away by thorough command of the subject matter, and the many insights. I have a PhD in this space, I work in this industry, I eat and breathe this topic every day, and _still_ there are numerous things I learned from this video. Kudos, well done!
In fact, polysilicon in the photovoltaic industry has lagged behind, now the high-efficiency solar panels are used monocrystalline silicon, and monocrystalline silicon purification slices have reached the level of production of semiconductors, China has completed the upgrade of the entire industry chain in this regard, and the West in the field of semiconductors formed the same advantage, the later will always have a cost advantage, and the advantage will be greater and greater with time. At the time of the video China's solar panel power generation cost was 1yuan/kW-h, but by today 2022, his cost has fallen to close to the feed-in tariff of traditional thermal power plants 3mao(1yuan=10mao)/kW-h, which means that the cost of solar power generation has begun to be lower than traditional energy, the market will spontaneously promote the transformation of traditional energy to new energy, the Chinese government from 2021 to The Chinese government will start to phase out subsidies for the PV industry from 2021 to 2025, allowing it to accept full market competition.
Great video. Question, why is the solar inverter the most valuable part of this industry? Note to self, the highest profit margins are generated from the firms providing the silicon (start of process) and installation (end of process), not manufacturing (middle of the process)
What China did is fantastic and the whole world benefits from it. It is important to empathise that Japan did the same thing with the automobile industry I the 80's and the US did the same with the textile industry in the early 1900. Namely they learned from the industry leaders and improved on the technology. With regards to the American investment, I seriously doubt it would have made much difference if it did not happen because the Chinese government would have made the investment itself without any issues l.
well they didnt steall the other countries tecnoligy, copied everithing and then dumped it on other coutnries destoiyng theyr economies like china is doing, and Japan made changes to prevent that when countires start complaning about some similar situations ..... don try to compra the scum of the CCP to Japan
@@markcasila8310 "they didnt steall the other countries tecnoligy, copied everithing" you cant´be that stupid, can you? did you ever heard of industrial espionage? www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/27/the-oldest-game-industrial-espionage-timeline/ securityintelligence.com/articles/10-myths-and-misconceptions-about-industrial-espionage/
@@peterfireflylund Don't worry about that. They are going to make a lot of money. Once Chinese companies crushed the competition they will become oligopolies and compete among themselves and the winners will become monopolies and make insane profits. Then comes international regulations to curb their corporate reach. Same as what happened to US, Europe and Japan. Economic Karma goes around.
@@questworldmatrix True. There is no corporate interest that lobby against renewables so there is plenty of political will to move quickly. For China oil is not a commodity to profit from but a strategic resource and relieving oil demand is key to its energy self-sufficiency. Right now China couldn't last a 3-month oil embargo if relations with the west go really sour. US is hopeless as corporations are just way too powerful to allow meaningful changes. They always want to maintain the status quo.
Would *love* to see this topic revisited. The US inflation reduction act and trade tariffs has shaken up the playing field significantly. Many EU solar manufacturers are building or have built new facilities in the US. It would be interesting to see the perspective of Asiam companies, particularly those in China, ad they adjust to changing market conditions.
We sold our patents on purpose, dumping prices for solar. Nowitis cheaper than anyone in the world could make it. Thatnks to china solar energy got cheap. So yes but no. We would beableto makeit but noone would buy it. Germany is too expensive as a place for production when it comes to differebt goods.
Chinas workforce is almost 20 times larger than Germanys and when you have State capitalism, political will goes *much* farther. It's pretty much impossible to compete with China in an area that the CPC has an active interest in.
@@grmasdfII I did not even expect that solar cells would be produced in Germany in the long term. We created a market, so that somebody outside of Germany has a guarantee to have a customer for a long time. It was basically cooperation with China, in some way.
Great summary of the solar sector! A video idea would be looking at the recent Trump trade tensions forcing Chinese companies move to Malaysia and other countries to bypass tariffs.
We can put tariffs on them, too! USA already lost the precision machinery, robotics, steel industries, and is not even a food importer! it has to have at least one industry of the future!
I doubt that. Pretty sure Chinese company just bypass the tariffs by shifting their product to Hongkong then globally. It will count as a hongkong product rather than a China product
China has a homogeneous socity which is highly united, with their super efficient hybrid political system( capitalism +socalism) and hard working Chinese people and with so many STEM graduates each year, I am not surprised China will take leading roles in many fields.
asianometry, could you delve into China's new found love for archeology? Chinese archeologists just made their biggest find in recent history and hardly the Western media is talking about it. Could you make a video out of it? Like where the find is, the cultural impact it is doing to the Chinese people, and any topic that comes with it.
I have an observation that may be related to your story. Since 1995-ish, most households in China use solar panel based water heater. Those are only heat generating solar panels, but that has to be a huge factor for the solar industry in China. Aside from all those you mentioned, the early adoption of solar tech in a large scale in China may have provided their solar industry a lifeline.
Yes, in my hometown village, every family installed solar panel water heater. The price was 150$ at that time, and it was cheap and every family can afford it. It totally improved people's life quality there. Cleaner in low cost.
It's important to note that China's cost advantage has little to do with cheap labor. Median wage in China is $13k USD per person per year, compared to just $600 in India and Vietnam. If it's all about labor, all Chinese manufacturing would have moved south of their border decades ago. It's simply cheaper, easier, and faster to do business in general, and manufacturing in particular, in China. I'm not just talking about physical infrastructure, but also supply chain, government efficiency, and general business environment. Take something as mundane as copper wire, you'll be able to find hundreds of suppliers at competitive prices within a half mile radius in Shenzhen, ready to deliver the next day. In Detroit, you have maybe half a dozen, taking upward of a month to deliver. In Shenzhen, you can come up with a gadget in your head, walk down the street to have in prototyped within an hour, submit it to the government and have it tested, reviewed and approved by relevant agencies in 2 days, contract a factory at the outskirts of the city, and have it mass produced and hit the market before end of the week. In the US and EU, it sometimes take north of a year for the government to drag their heels alone, if you have something new that's not a derivative of an existing product. Everything is more efficient in China, the infrastructure, the support services, the manufacturers, and especially the government. It's synergy/critical mass, not cheap labor. Dismissing Chinese success as cheap labor robs you the chance of seeing, and copying what they did right, correcting what we did wrong. Protectionism only leaves us further behind.
I once bump into the CEO of Genting group travelling in economy. They are billionaires. Genting is opening a casino in Las Vegas. They had a big casino in Singapore.
Great video, but I think folks should also step back and recognize how solar is still far, far, far away from being as clean as we think it is. Those solar panels degrade and require a ton of space and without battery storage, solar is a pretty inefficient energy source. Nuclear has its own set of issues, but is probably the most reliable CO2 free source of energy
Nuclear isn't CO2 free, just very low over the lifetime of a powerplant. More CO2/kWh than wind and hydro, lower than solar. Any sort of fossil fuel energy is awful, of course.
As pv eficienty keeps increasing the amount of space they need decreases conciderably. Over the last 10 years efficienty doubled. So only half the space is required to generate the same amount of energy. And that will happen again over the next decade. Add to that the continual decreasing price per panel, Enabling huge amounts of people and businesses to become energy independent. Panels easilly last 3 decades or more as well. And while that is happening investment in battery production and development is trough the roof. We will be drowning in cheap storage pretty soon. Nuclear is just way to expensive and political toxic to ever become a viable option again. If you can even find people willing to invest the amounts of money needed into it. Way to risky and it takes ages to see any return on investment.
@@grmasdfII CO2 per kWh or hydro is twice that of nuclear (24g vs 12g of CO2). Wind and nuclear are pretty comparable (11g vs 12g). All according to the IPCC report from 2014. More recent estimates by the UN put nuclear's emissions even lower at around 6g. Of course, solar and wind still need natural gas (several hundred gs of CO2) as backup when there's no wind or sun, as of now.
Why should one exclude the other? My parents had a 'bad roof' and refused electricity consumption by 30%. I have a good roof and the projected reduction is going to be 90-100% during the day. Do you have any idea what the impact is of your backup source needing to cover 30-40% of your use at the good times, instead of 100% all of the time? Most importantly it can be scaled down: I can't fit a nuclear reactor in my garage. I can put solar panels on my roof. This means the electrical grid needs to be expanded less. Which is currently THE big killer for a nuclear future because you'd need a HUGE electric grid investment to get your electricity from a handful of locations.
i live in the state of Georgia (USA). Qcells has built several new plants here. vice president harris visited the one in Dalton,Ga this year. ///// Hanwha is the leading shareholder in REC Silicon, which announced that the entirety of its polysilicon supply coming out of Moses Lake, Washington, for the next 10 years will go to Qcells (approximately 3.6 GW annually). Qcells is also starting a 3.3-GW ingot, wafer, cell and panel manufacturing factory in Cartersville, Georgia, alongside its existing panel manufacturing sites in Dalton, Georgia. The company should have 8.4 GW of silicon solar panel capacity in the United States by the end of 2024.
Chinese made solar hardware inexpensive to many. Here in the Philippines 🇵🇭🇵🇭🇵🇭, almost all are Chinese made including mine installed whereas all are Chinese and it helped with the electric bill and power outage.
maybe it's because china is now the 2nd largest market in the world and Germany sells a lot to china ....... even Mercedes Benz said China is their no.1 customer ..... so they got preferred ....... bottom line is it's business
Wonderful video....and yes i am partly a beneficiary of the cost effective china made solar technology, was finally able to install a solar pv system on my residence rooftop..
That was a right comment 20 years ago. But now, there's union in China. The labour costs in China have gone up very quickly in recent years. Plus, there's 1 million of engineers graduated every year in China. The quality of China workers are elevating dramatically as well.
Here's a question on solar PVs. Since they typically have an effective lifespan of around 25 years, what happens after that. Do they get dumped in landfills becoming like what plastic waste is to us today? Especially considering that not much of it can be recycled.
actually, solar panel recycling has come a long way, and the panels are roughly 93% recyclable. The frames are 100% recyclable, the glass is 95% reusable after being separated, and then thermal processing at 500 degrees Celsius allows the cells to be separated, and finally etching away the silicon wafers and smelting them back into usable slabs makes that portion 85% reusable. It's pretty sweet!
@@briangardner5899 plastic bottles are supposed to be highly recycleable too. But look where they end up. There needs to be a good discussion on sustainability too.
In 2024, it's amazing how rapid the global production of pure silicon continues to expand. Forecast is for Estimates are 600-650 GW of solar to be installed globally, a 55% year-over-year industry growth. (2023 growth was up 70% YoY). It would be interesting to understand how such growth continues to be sustainable, from prospective of scaling up production, production efficiencies?
Please be civil in the comments. Would your mother approve of that nasty comment you're writing?
For other videos on tech industry analyses, check out the asianometry playlist of global semiconductor issues: ruclips.net/p/PLKtxx9TnH76QEYXdJx6KyycNGHePJQwWW
hi
Are you British or American? Your English is very fluent
@@sdprz7893 His english is American english, so definitely American.
you had many euphemism against the Chinese manufacturer as well, but in civilized manner. Business is business. If they want to blame of Chinese gov subsidy, they can subsidy their own industry as well. Every government gives subsidy in many different forms, including feed-in-tariff.
I'd have to ask her she's her own person
An important event that helped Chinese companies was the spike in silicon prices a little over 10 years ago. Japanese and western companies invested billions into thin film solar cells (which use less silicon), while China kept using the "old" and more expensive technology. When silicon suppliers increased their production, silicon prices suddenly dropped making Chinese solar panels a lot cheaper. Japanese manufacturers wasted precious resources into a technology that wasn't needed anymore and couldn't afford investing more into expanding production capacity. The rest is history.
You really have to question the wisdom of these companies splurging on research not on developing a better and cheaper panel, but to save silicon. Silicon is just sand. The bottleneck on sand products is entirely an artificially created one that won't last forever.
@@georgedang449 Keep in mind that major silicon suppliers were just 3 companies (2 of which Japanese) at the time (it was a very small market mostly for microchips), so it probably made sense, seeing the high price silicon was fetching back then. Chinese solar companies were probably aware that massive new silicon supply was being scaled up in China and that the bottleneck was only temporary.
@@georgedang449 they may had went the wrong way but the knowledge they learnt from the research is never useless. It's simply not as useful for now, but it will serve as a step for human to move forward in the future.
@@mira-rara Perhaps another time, on another planet, where sand is rare. But I doubt these companies will be around by then. The Japanese solar industry as a whole is already 6 feet under for contributing useless sand saving methods to humanity's collective knowledge.
@@georgedang449 The method to create those can be referenced in other thin film technology, which we used alot in our daily life. Technology in PV isn't limited to PV only, the science knowledge we obtained can be applied in other ways.
Not to mention it's not always optimal to use alot of silicon, in some application it may not be possible to use a thick PV.
You have not mentioned the most important point: China has a Hugh domestic market. China has installed the most amount of panels in the world. It supported those Chinese companies even without export.
19:15 they do mention this point.
Plus silica is so cheap that there should be no reason for it to be expensive. China charge for materials and labor while rest of the world over charged. The technology is simple and anyone can do it. They just have the best price. They supply the world
I think you’re glossing over the fact the world trade phase of this was in the 90’s and back then no one in China, India, or any other “developing” nation was even thinking of buying a solar panel. So at that time the export was all there was and it was critical.
Who is "Hugh"?
@@paulbryan6716 Huge* but yeah hugh sounds interesting
The research for the Chinese panels was done at the University of New South Waḻes Australia and on the team was a Chinese student who approached the Australian government for $10 Million to start manufacturing and was knocked back. He approached the Chinese government and was given $100 Million.. Hence Australia AGAIN lost the chance to be a player in this industry. Australia incidentally has the highest ratio of people using solar panels on the planet.
China has Cultivated a large number of engineers, not lawyers, that's important
don't forget MBA executives
Blood sucking lawyers are useless.
@@q3813 but you need them anyway and pay a lot
@@q3813 they produce nothing but arguement
So true! Not a country govern by rule of law, why bother becoming a lawyer?
I did not even expect that German industry would produce solar cells in the long term. But I'm quite happy that Germany helped to create a market, motivating Chinese companies to scale up production. The amount of subsidy seemed a little crazy at the time, and now I'm proud we did it, as it was more useful than I expected.
i mean.. german wages > chinese wages.
Also another commenter mentioned tech viability. So it was a double whammy
By now, Germany only exists to sell out to China anyway.
@@TheHighborn The most important factor that germany lost were political decisions. Less subsidies and hinderances. E.g. solar grew very fast, way faster than expectations, and became dangerous to the coal industry. Thus politics put a cap of a few gigatons per year in place and if that cap was exceeded the following years less solar would be build. Politics like this destroyed the german solar industry, not expensive labor or tech viability. Even today Germany is suffering from stupid decisions that hindered faster adoption of renewables. I think the most stupid thing I saw so far was the 10H rule (look it up)... Well, now people are paying on average 10 Cent per kWh more than last year and Germany was already one of the most expensive countries when it came to energy...
For some reason 25% of people would still vote for the party that governed for 16 years and was at fault for this disaster but well, at least we finally got a government change last election.
Yeah, you financed chinese jobs
What a thing to be proud
@@sotch2271 What is wrong with that?
One thing you neglect to discuss was the crash and consolidation of the China solar indistry. We always hear about how this or that EU or US solar company crashed (usually blamed on China), but seldom about the blood-letting in China. Suggested topic!
The issue for Germany was the lack of subsidies to support such crucial industrie. 30,000 jobs were lost in Germany alone.
30k sounds like not enough. The German ministry for Energy listed 150k jobs in the solar industry in 2013 but only 50k in 2021. The decline was wayyy steeper
@@paxundpeace9970 it wasn't the lack of subsidies but the abrupt cut of those. if the subsidies would have been phased out over some years the companies could have adopted, but 🤷
many things point at more or less influences by big German energy conglomerates that at this point still mostly produced by burning fossil fuels.
Then it would go down to the political system. The Chinese systems are always based on efficiency
Just one example, China has only one time zone. Think about it how efficient it with be compare with 5 time zones that US has. If that is not troublesome. Add day-light saving time... think about it!
Another huge factor has to do with solar grade silicon manufacturing. With the price going from $35/kg to over $300, as you mentioned in passing, how that came back down to a reasonable price is important. This huge factor of 10 price signal in a high production material science area would create a massive expansion in the capacity as fast as it could be built. However, in Europe, the US, and Japan/Korea these facilities require permissions from hundreds of agencies, environmental impact reports, etc., and even considering a "greenfield" massive expansion for a billion-dollar class facility takes decades to obtain all the approvals. These are massive manufacturing facilities and a bit of a cross between iron production and chemical plants with hazardous materials and just huge scale.
The producers in the US, Europe, and outside China could only really expand existing facilities and couldn't get permissions for new facilities on a reasonable time scale in an expanding market. My understanding was that China build a 1.5 billion dollar facility in less than 1.5 years (about right without permission and regulatory issues) and paid for that facility in the first 6 mo of production profits. When supply caught up with demand, the question would be who got the silicon at a reasonable price first and it wouldn't be Germany or US with all their silicon expansion plans still working on environmental impact reports and hiring lobbyists. Too little, too late.
The Environmen is our Holly Cow!
One should note however, that this focus on environmental paperwork is probably the reason Europeans don't have to wear masks against pollution when outdoors (excluding the recent few years' issues, of course)
China solar is produced in Xinjiang...
with abundant cheap coal.....
Yep. Western states are good in managing to kill themselves with laws and regulations.
and slave labor
funny how no one is protesting a decade long genocide of the Uyghurs
@@dennyli9339
Civil comment: I still wish solar were much cheaper.....doesn’t make financial sense for my house and power costs.
In some part of China, it was reported that in July 2020, the solar energy price can be as low as 0.016 USD/kWh and on average about 0.062USD/kWh. The cost had reduced by 80% since 2012, according to a Chinese report. I guess that is why the Chinese leader dared to declare to reach carbon neutralization by 2060, despite a huge manufacturing industry usage of energy.
@@lolpolitics3363 As was pointed out in this presentation, solar panels are not the highest cost item - that would go to the inverter, plus installation.
@@lne176 Yes. I was talking about the total cost of one kWh of energy generated in a solar farm including all installation and maintenance.
I'm surprised it doesn't make sense for you, over here in Australia it's a pretty great deal.
@@lne176 ruclips.net/video/sUvaYycoWqI/видео.html
I did a Ph.D. in low-cost solar silicon manufacturing and also have a startup from my Ph.D. It is true that the solar module supply chain is extremely competitive and China is definitely leading the way. Thank you for the informational video
How do you have a startup from your PhD? I wasn't planning on doing a PhD, but if that's a way to break into business... I can't figure this out and I have no mentor.
@@fusion9619 Just do it....you studied to get the knowledge and expertise now put it to use..............just thinking about doing it is a recipe for a non event coming to YOUR neighborhood very soon.
Please share your thoughts on your PHD & Startup 🙏🙏👍👍
@@universalexplorer4023 A PhD is very unspecific, in terms of topic and what the company does. But when you got a PhD done, chances are higher that you get the work for the company done. Which is a lot.
There is not much relation between PhD in general and starting a business. What he says is that his specific PhD had a result that was useful to start his specific company.
@@fusion9619
The way to do it is pretty simple really. You spend a few years living off savings or investments as you advertise yourself and undercut the competition to get a few landmark jobs, which you then use in networking and advertising.
I used the cash from a 4 year military contract (cushy job as a support lieutenant, foreign deployments for cash) to basically live off while also spending weekends excersizing as a reservist to sustain myself.
Being an entrepreneur gets a lot easier if you don't need a salary for over a year.
What you need to work out though is what you do, and what you don't. My biggest mistake was adapting to suit people's needs, so we ended up claiming to be specialised in everything.
We work property development, and since we advertised that we don't design, we don't build, we coordinate building and we don't work for governments, things have been much simpler since everybody knows what we do.
As opposed to a confusing "But we also do that, and also that and also that, and that"
China is winning because their local demand is huge , and also the government involvement and support is huge.
also their share investment is went through the roof when it was peak.
I don't recall seeing any solar panels on roofs in the eastern part of China. Maybe they're hidden somewhere?
And forced labor
@@williamPwarner with 2 billion peopl in china ...... it's not forced labor it's just simply way way way cheaper labor
@@williamPwarner I guess you mean Uygurs. They are mostly less educated and less willing to word hard. It's less likely to force those Muslims working hard to beat Germans.
The german manufacturing equipment supplier you are talking about is „Meyer Burger“. They shifted their strategy last year and stopped selling their next gen solar manufacturing equipment. They use it themselves to produce high efficiency panels in Germany starting in June 2021.
I'm not really sure if that is the wisest idea. Especially if they don't move the production to cheaper countries, or do some VERY good innovation in this field. We will see I guess. I would rather buy German than Chinese that's for sure. :)
@@LannisterFromDaRock I don't understand how Germany manufactures anything at all with high labour costs, but they do, so maybe solar will be the same. Long warranty will help compete against cheaper products.
@@LannisterFromDaRock I would prefer a Chinese made product than an overpriced German products for the same quality.
i think it's too late now
@@jon8864 As far as I know, the panels are planned to work for 25 years. Even the Chinese ones. You don't need a longer time than that because innovation in the field will render everything useless in that timeframe. Also, the panels have no moving parts, so I can imagine that fault rates are already pretty low. I wish the best for the Germans on this, but manufacturing commodity items with good margins is very tricky.
Great video, lots of well researched information delivered concisely with no bullshit
There are always winners and losers in business. The cheaper solar becomes, the more PVs installer, the better for all of us, regardless of who is better at manufacturing and selling them.
if USA is winning this, no one will even make a video about it. you know what I mean, right?
@@下上-n2n The US is not winning at anything except printing money. US industrial production is a shadow of it's former self.
@@下上-n2n The issue the USA has is that its capital owners don't care about their nation at all, and the national government refuses to change this.
@@TulipQ Capital owners don't like going bankrupt, so they put their capital where it gives them competitive returns.
@@kashay4415 Do you think China has a future in manufacturing? The world has seen the low level of intelligence in China, after seeing videos of hasmat-suited idiots spraying empty streets, testing fish for Covid, wrapping prisoners in duct tape and taking them away.
It's understandable to put up tariffs to protect domestic production, but it's sad considering how fossil fuels are subsidized here in the US. It would have been nice for the west to have subsidized domestic solar instead... At least the tariffs are set to expire soon
I think s trump save d. The coal job s. Giving million s of solar job s to China soft power goes along with it 4years is. This ever raised on radio program ect ect ect
GREEN was subsidized in the USA, remember solyndra. Most of them turned out to be scams like that.
@@braddl9442 what kind of scam was it?
@@freefood89 SOLAR, but it was just a scam to get gov money and they didnt produce anything.
US does subsidize renewables, a lot of subsidies in fact. The issue isn’t just inadequate renewables energy generation, but inadequate infrastructure in transmission, transportation and storage as well. Also for whatever reason, Americans denounce nuclear and geothermal.
谢谢！
Germany lost because of stupid politicians who made energy expensive without any discrimination of the purpose
Around 30% of our electricity price is.. just there to be there and make it more expensive..
If living in Germany, you will see that so-called german efficiency is a hoax. I don't say germans are bad and low-skilled. It's just that this efficiency is overrated. Case in point: Berlin Airport. Another case in point: manually typing Covid cases between government agencies, with fax machine. Another case: Tesla complained about german bureaucracy.
@@oceanwave4502 lol do you know that in Netherlands to be vaccinated you have to receive letter, in many developing countries you have online form that you fill and your doctor will call you when to go or you will receive mail.
@@oceanwave4502 That a prick like Elon Musk complains if it does not work like he wants is not new.
He turned into a Karen (not recently but more obviously recently) 😂
But you are right, the efficiency might be overrated, but it's because everything has to be well thought and perfect and under these premises it can't be that efficient.
Sometimes it would be better to improvise and sometimes the perfection is absolutely right...
For example: Wooden rails from the hardware store in a 50000 $ Tesla ?!?
@@schubi128 yeah. It's sad.
Sounds very similar to how they developed high speed trains.
They didn't develop them at all. There are still German engineers all over China building them.
@@fusion9619 Hey man, are we living in the same year of 2021? you need to update your knowledge
@@erictoo1035 I was literally just in China
@@erictoo1035 you know all China did with those trains is get foreign parts and rebrand them. They didn't develop anything at all. They just put parts together which all mechanical parts are foreign made
@@kaitoshinichi guess they're following the same path as USA and Japan, once they start creating new unique technologies rather than relaying on value added from cheap labour only then will they start giving a rat's ass about conforming to IP regulations.
Your channel is gold! Not sure what I'll use all the information for yet, but it's surely interesting to know. Great research.
Incredibly deep research went into this video on this so knowledgeable channel!
I remembered the compromise was reached for the anti-dumping for solar panels because China threatened to retaliate by blocking European companies to participate in China’s 4G rollout. That would kill both Ericsson and Nokia.
Haha, China does that all the time. Here, we give you 1% of our market. Westerner CEO drool while China takes the global market completely.
@@TheBooban It's not 1%. Those two regularly get 1/3 or 2/3 of the bid for telecom equipment in China -- mind you, Chinese telecom companies are all state-owned.
@@ecpgieicg Foreign companies have built 2/3 of China's telecommunications market?
@@TheBooban First, typo, 1/4 or 1/3. The articles you can search for them and see for yourself.
And no to your question. **Your notion of "build" is deeply flawed.** I specifically said bid for telecom equipment. For example, selling a switch is not deploying a switch, is not integrating it into a grid, is not maintaining a grid.
@@ecpgieicg so you mean they just sell stuff? Where is this stuff produced?
When I was younger, the Solar industry was seen as the future technology that would help pull post-industrial cities out of their misery by providing new manufacturing jobs. Sad to see how that went.
Exactly. The globalists said we would transform with industries of the future.
You should not be sad but be happy to see the green future comes much easier and earlier because of China. A single city workers’ lost is way to small comparing the the gain of the whole human race.
@@xuhuadaniel3810 Yes, that is a rational standpoint from the Chinese perspective. After all, it's China's whole business strategy to produce goods cheaper than in other countries, which means that you get the benefits of both the jobs and the money from exporting the products, leaving the other countries as cash cows full of unemployed people. However, Chinese PVs aren't much cheaper than western ones, the advantage is quite narrow. Meanwhile, Chines PVs are produced at much lower environmental standarts than western ones, leading to them having a much higher carbon footprint. From that perspective it certainly wasn't to the benefit to the whole planet.
Big oil said no and fought back. Only a government that is not controlled by billionaires and big business can say... lets enter the future even if it means discarding the billion dollar business of today. This is why China can do this.
@@keyboardt8276 which part?
One of the reasons the subsidies were cut is the following: paying people for putting solar cells on their roofs benefits exactly one type of people: those who own a property AND are already well off.
Even though subsidised during energy production, there is a lot of upfront cost which poorer households can't affort. Never mind those which don't even own a property themselves or are in an apartment building. So essentially it was just an amazing investment vehicle for those with money to burn. That didn't sit well with a lot of the population in Germany.
It goes much further
Those with enough starting capital at that time and a house to put solar on where given contracts for decades granting them more €/W put into the grid then the average price of energy.
It doesn’t take a rich person more than 2 seconds to understand that you can hook up your neighbors power line to yours, putting in their energy pull as your output as “solar energy” , thereby generating “free” money, which was then split between rich guy and neighbor. This still goes on to this date, also the ones that bought solar cells back then bought the cheapest Chinese ones with low efficiency and lower lifespan , so they didn’t even generate at least some energy to make up for their constant burning of resources. Guess who pays for the net profit generated by selling the same energy back to the system for more money? The tax payers that were already to broke to get solar back then in the first place.
Thanks Green Party , they had one job and killed German solar thereby forcing exclusive production under much worse conditions for the climate.
The main advantage of China is that they don't have oil lobby
Among other lobbies!
Norway's oil fund invested huge amount of money in chinese solar panels technology, same with apple, Tesla, google and many other tech companies. One day the oil industry will be mostly gone, but capital created by the oil industry will still make money. They buy shopping centers in other countries. I think they own a business street in London.
A good documentary, thanks for your efforts. But on 19:22 the narrator said: "And the (Chinese) government has been responding a little bit, growing their installed solar capacity across the country." Actually China installed 49,655 MW new solar PV capacity in 2020 (254,355 MW in total), which is 37% of worldwide capacity (35.6% in total), and more than EU, America and Japan combined.
I'd not say that's "a little bit".
The guy is anti-China, he will hardly give the credit in the right way to that country to the point of useing any word or detail to minimize any of China's achievements.
All of the recent videos showing Zero Covid lockdown scenes in Shanghai (testing fish, spraying empty streets, drones flying around telling people to "control your soul's desire for freedom) have destroyed everybody's belief that the Chinese have the intelligence to compete with the world in scientific progress.
@@anfrex3342 china's best achievements are those that they have stolen from others, so nothing to congratulate
@@vegasu9418 Repeat that until you begin to believe it.
He is talking about 2012, not today
A couple points. Raw materials going into making the pure polysilicon comes from China from my understanding and for what doesn't come from there, most the rest comes from Russia. Once China got good at producing the material needed for the panels, it was THEIR efforts that caused the prices to drop so much because they didn't charge those huge profit margins. So frankly it was Chinese companies that allowed solar to be so affordable like it is now. Western businesses were too busy making insane profit margins. As was pointed out, Chinese companies improved the equipment involved in the manufacturing process which also allowed costs to come down, so pretty much everything about how good the panels are now along with the low cost, if you're outside the US and don't have to pay a stupid ass 25% tariff thanks to Trump and Biden which has slowed the growth of solar installs, is brought to you by Chinese R&D
What allowed the Chinese solar industry to do well during the Great Recession is the govt did a lot of investing in bringing solar energy to different parts of China. In fact the Chinese govt. has done more investing into green energy like wind and solar than any other govt. in the world. Some may say this is unfair, but I don't see how a country investing in its own infrastructure is unfair. It's smart.
Solyndra had a TOTALLY different business model. Because of the cost of polysilicon continually going up as the companies involved in its production kept pushing prices higher, Solyndra was using other materials to produce solar panels. They would have been successful if the Chinese companies didn't get involved. The cost for that material, polysilicon dropped by 90% within about a 1 - 2 year time frame. So because Chinese companies came in and helped to greatly reduce the cost of this raw material needed for the panels, the panels Solyndra were making which DIDN'T use polysilicon couldn't compete.
So bravo to the many Chinese efforts in solar technology along with cost controls in the supply chain. It was THEIR efforts that have allowed the huge growth in solar energy, and nothing western companies were doing, which were mostly focused on maximizing their profit margins and trying to get every last bit of incentive dollars coming from the different govts. Their demise was them not trying to compete but instead always focusing on high profit margins. The main thing the Chinese govt. did was put money into R&D, which is the same thing western govts. do, along with ensuring there was large growth in solar energy in China to help their industries, and this isn't unfair either. Their govt. has no rules about the govt. being independent of business. To me, I think Western govts. need to rethink their separation between business and govt, the US ESPECIALLY because they've cut so much money from R&D that it's harder to compete against most Asian businesses where their govts. will put money where they see it's best used. Now, what China does from time to time is out of line with the tenets of the WTO so personally I don't feel China belongs in the WTO, but that's another topic.
You are the smart guy and agree with you totally.
Damn, that is amazing. You know so much about this! Mad prop
Brilliant as ever.
can we appreciate that a deer made this channel
🤣 😂
😅
Best comment so far.
hahaha ur comment makes my day
Some deer are very intelligent. I have seen their videos on RUclips.
I work in the Solar Industry in Calif. U.S.A. and I have more than one of the solar panels
you talked about ay my house, Great Video Thanks
Great work as per usual!!
That’s a nice flag you got there, Inshallah mankind will unite one day
Detailed study. Professional presentation
Anyway, the reason is that Chinese government really wants cheaper solar cost. Just have a look at the stats from 2013 to 2018, they have real demand for solar energy.
Cause Chinese people were literary dying from air pollution. The chinese worker productivity was being affected. Something had to be done. Coal plants and ICE cars had to go.
Hey, thanks. Keep up the good work.
Your video explained why Chinese panels overtaken German panels, a question which baffled me for a long time.
However, I am still baffled why solar energy become a thing THIS time around while I didn't see any major technical breakthrough. And I've been around for a long time and witness hype over solar energy 2-3 times before this round.
Take a look at this. What Is Wright's Law | Learning Curve of Innovation ark-invest.com/wrights-law/
It is the same reason that will make electric cars cheaper than gas cars.
It's due to chinese own development and hard work.
Because it is cheap enough now. It wasn’t before.
There's another reason or two, Harvey, that I didn't go into earlier because I was on my iPad.
1) we have small gas peaker plants now.
2) we have decent megabatteries now and they are only going to get bigger, better, and cheaper. Thank you, consumer electronics! Thank you, electric cars! Megabatteries can replace (and are already replacing) some of the peaker plants. In the long run, we might be able to get rid of all of them.
3) we have better and cheaper power electronics now. We have transistors that work with much higher voltages and much higher currents. They are *really* useful for EVs but they are also *really* useful for turning photovoltaic power into DC for battery charging or into 110 (120)/220 (240) volt AC for the grid -- or for going from grid power to DC battery charging power. The losses are much smaller now and they are much more reliable. They are *also* really useful for transforming electricity up/down, even without using AC. That means we can start using HVDC cables instead of HVAC -- the losses in HVDC are smaller, especially if they are in the ground or under water.
4) we have small, cheap computers everywhere + we have internet everywhere. That makes it easy to keep track of more details of the grid in real-time + it makes it realistic to turn off certain loads in a smart way when the total load on the grid is too high. Perhaps there are big freezers that can be turned off for a while with no harm, for example.
@@chriswestwood3289 Hard work, yes. "Own development", not so much... Plus lots of pollution in China due to lax regulations.
Good point：We lost the solar market. But the low price could help whole world to use solar energy.
Your research on many topics is outstanding
Your video mostly spotlight the story before 2015. All the companies you mentioned never back to the top. Companies like Longi now lead the industry.
You tells the truth. never mind, few can see your comment.
What I can relate is that when regulations in Brazil allowed grid-tie installations for everyone it boomed a entire new market. Most of our country is excellent for solar production, and if the government were more competent they would subdise that so many would have a better and greener power plant.
BP used to have a solar panel plant in Sydney Australia in the 1990s. I have 20 of these panels still up on the roof and after 25 years they still operate at about 75% rated capacity. The plant closed in the early 2000s and the equipment sent to China.
Impressive way ahead of time
The equipment weren't gifted to China. Likewise, they came to US, bought some old steel mill equipment, modified and upgraded, then produced competitive products. The US mills were glad to sell those machines, otherwise they would have rusted and junked. I can still show you rusted equipment in my state.
Yep!. BP once made solar panels and did so for quite some years. BP announced in 2011 it was getting out of the solar module market, due to increasing competition and thinning margins.
Owners like you still with BP Panels report even on the coldest winter day their BP solar panels are still producing
China looks forward in centuries and USA looks forward in quarterly profits!
Yes, 200years plan.
Much easier to look forward centuries when you don't have election pressures. Long term plans are nice but the results can take a while to materialize. In that time frame, average citizens who don't know as much sees nothing happening. Nothing is happening In the moment and out you go.
No, CCP subsidy the Chinese solar companies so they can lower to a ridiculous price that all non Chinese companies can't survive and they will bring back up the price when there are only Chinese companies left
@@pikenote Ironically you just described how democracies function, China's development over the past 4 decades is transformative.
Quaterly profits and election cycles; blinding long term vision for its citizen. We currently have former Republicans lobbying for Chinese firms on the banned list.
Good program 🤓
Even a few years ago, investors would shy away from the solar industry in China, for the competition is just too fierce and each company, even the largest one run risk of bankruptcy everyday. China started at the middle of the chain, which is more labor intensive, and wt
low barrier to entry. Yet they need to buy machines and raw materials that were expensive, but sell at low prices as a result of competition. So many companies failed, I remember I once visited a solar co. for due diligence, as they aimed to IPO, didn’t succeeded, and the company went bankrupt 2 years ago.
It is just the way commodity markets work.
That is why you can have massive 500 euro tv's nowdays and mobile phones cost a couple of bucks.
Someone has to pay for those low prices.
Very nice video .it isn’t easy to collect so much information from a different language.thank you.it seems technology industry is something more complex than technology itself .
When a show like this (known for covering a diverse range of topics) covers your industry or area of expertise, you usually come away pretty disappointed. But in this case, I am blown away by thorough command of the subject matter, and the many insights. I have a PhD in this space, I work in this industry, I eat and breathe this topic every day, and _still_ there are numerous things I learned from this video. Kudos, well done!
Awesome video
In fact, polysilicon in the photovoltaic industry has lagged behind, now the high-efficiency solar panels are used monocrystalline silicon, and monocrystalline silicon purification slices have reached the level of production of semiconductors, China has completed the upgrade of the entire industry chain in this regard, and the West in the field of semiconductors formed the same advantage, the later will always have a cost advantage, and the advantage will be greater and greater with time. At the time of the video China's solar panel power generation cost was 1yuan/kW-h, but by today 2022, his cost has fallen to close to the feed-in tariff of traditional thermal power plants 3mao(1yuan=10mao)/kW-h, which means that the cost of solar power generation has begun to be lower than traditional energy, the market will spontaneously promote the transformation of traditional energy to new energy, the Chinese government from 2021 to The Chinese government will start to phase out subsidies for the PV industry from 2021 to 2025, allowing it to accept full market competition.
Seemed very well balanced. Good job.
Great video. Question, why is the solar inverter the most valuable part of this industry? Note to self, the highest profit margins are generated from the firms providing the silicon (start of process) and installation (end of process), not manufacturing (middle of the process)
That goes for almost every industry.
I think he meant of the ancillary items, just the way it was worded.
What China did is fantastic and the whole world benefits from it. It is important to empathise that Japan did the same thing with the automobile industry I the 80's and the US did the same with the textile industry in the early 1900. Namely they learned from the industry leaders and improved on the technology. With regards to the American investment, I seriously doubt it would have made much difference if it did not happen because the Chinese government would have made the investment itself without any issues l.
well they didnt steall the other countries tecnoligy, copied everithing and then dumped it on other coutnries destoiyng theyr economies like china is doing, and Japan made changes to prevent that when countires start complaning about some similar situations ..... don try to compra the scum of the CCP to Japan
@@markcasila8310 "they didnt steall the other countries tecnoligy, copied everithing" you cant´be that stupid, can you? did you ever heard of industrial espionage?
www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe
foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/27/the-oldest-game-industrial-espionage-timeline/
securityintelligence.com/articles/10-myths-and-misconceptions-about-industrial-espionage/
Very nicely made, thank you 👍
Thank you for the extended video!
One word for China's competitiveness: speed.
I would say willingness to apply what is learned too. Unlike US corporations that buried the electric car and rail to prop up the oil industry.
Low labour costs, high pollution, theft of technology, limitless state loans... I wonder if China has even made any actual money on solar cells yet...
@@peterfireflylund
Don't worry about that. They are going to make a lot of money. Once Chinese companies crushed the competition they will become oligopolies and compete among themselves and the winners will become monopolies and make insane profits. Then comes international regulations to curb their corporate reach. Same as what happened to US, Europe and Japan. Economic Karma goes around.
@@questworldmatrix True. There is no corporate interest that lobby against renewables so there is plenty of political will to move quickly. For China oil is not a commodity to profit from but a strategic resource and relieving oil demand is key to its energy self-sufficiency. Right now China couldn't last a 3-month oil embargo if relations with the west go really sour.
US is hopeless as corporations are just way too powerful to allow meaningful changes. They always want to maintain the status quo.
No, a complete lack of concern for the environment, slave labor, and a need to show off.
Would *love* to see this topic revisited. The US inflation reduction act and trade tariffs has shaken up the playing field significantly. Many EU solar manufacturers are building or have built new facilities in the US. It would be interesting to see the perspective of Asiam companies, particularly those in China, ad they adjust to changing market conditions.
Congratulations for your efforts👍👍👍👏👏👏
Thanks! Enjoyed watching your informative video.
Love this essay. In the new era with a more defensive stance towards Chinese exporters, would Germany still have lost the solar industry?
We sold our patents on purpose, dumping prices for solar.
Nowitis cheaper than anyone in the world could make it.
Thatnks to china solar energy got cheap.
So yes but no. We would beableto makeit but noone would buy it.
Germany is too expensive as a place for production when it comes to differebt goods.
Chinas workforce is almost 20 times larger than Germanys and when you have State capitalism, political will goes *much* farther. It's pretty much impossible to compete with China in an area that the CPC has an active interest in.
@@grmasdfII I did not even expect that solar cells would be produced in Germany in the long term. We created a market, so that somebody outside of Germany has a guarantee to have a customer for a long time. It was basically cooperation with China, in some way.
@@vsiegel those highly sophisticated machines who produce the cells are still made in germany.
@@Gartendalf and there is still a ton of jobs in Germany to do the installations.
Wow, thats a lot of views fast! Good job asianometry! You're always great but its nice to see that validated.
Will you make a video about the semi-conducter business? This was a very informative video. I'm surprised you don't have 100k subs
Semi Conductor is half of this channels video output.
Thank you so much for this candid honest analysis.
Great summary of the solar sector! A video idea would be looking at the recent Trump trade tensions forcing Chinese companies move to Malaysia and other countries to bypass tariffs.
India Pakistan Bangladesh 2 you could not make it up
It only moves the problem elsewhere
Chynese labor is too expensive now.
We can put tariffs on them, too! USA already lost the precision machinery, robotics, steel industries, and is not even a food importer! it has to have at least one industry of the future!
I doubt that. Pretty sure Chinese company just bypass the tariffs by shifting their product to Hongkong then globally. It will count as a hongkong product rather than a China product
Very good summary. Thank you.
hello I am happy I subscribed. m Thoughtful and well delivered.
Nice one. Expanded my knowledge, tnx.
China has a homogeneous socity which is highly united, with their super efficient hybrid political system( capitalism +socalism) and hard working Chinese people and with so many STEM graduates each year, I am not surprised China will take leading roles in many fields.
Excellent factual discussions and helpful analysis ! Thanks. Regards.
asianometry, could you delve into China's new found love for archeology? Chinese archeologists just made their biggest find in recent history and hardly the Western media is talking about it. Could you make a video out of it? Like where the find is, the cultural impact it is doing to the Chinese people, and any topic that comes with it.
Interesting topic.
it is not new found love. they have been doing it since ROC era.
@@kongwee1978 Li Hongzhang loved his archeology too.
How about you share some links to start us off?
Chinese people always cry for Western media's attention lmao
Labor costs, electricity cost, no R&D costs *copycat, intellectual property theft*, loose pollution regulations *absolute comparative advantage*, currency manipulation of the RMB, lots of different reasons
Excellent demonstration of the evolution of solar panel of Chinese hold and the market hold of western capitalism.
Great content 😊
It is a commodity product, and a lower cost producer almost always wins.
Every products is a commodities.
@@vangcruz4442 no. everything were people care about the brand is not a commodity
@@tristanwegner what do you care about?
Thanks for the information.
I have an observation that may be related to your story. Since 1995-ish, most households in China use solar panel based water heater. Those are only heat generating solar panels, but that has to be a huge factor for the solar industry in China. Aside from all those you mentioned, the early adoption of solar tech in a large scale in China may have provided their solar industry a lifeline.
yes,sun heat water,then can shower, that's very green
Yes, in my hometown village, every family installed solar panel water heater. The price was 150$ at that time, and it was cheap and every family can afford it. It totally improved people's life quality there. Cleaner in low cost.
Great, thanks.
Not too long, you covered a lot.
It's important to note that China's cost advantage has little to do with cheap labor. Median wage in China is $13k USD per person per year, compared to just $600 in India and Vietnam. If it's all about labor, all Chinese manufacturing would have moved south of their border decades ago. It's simply cheaper, easier, and faster to do business in general, and manufacturing in particular, in China. I'm not just talking about physical infrastructure, but also supply chain, government efficiency, and general business environment. Take something as mundane as copper wire, you'll be able to find hundreds of suppliers at competitive prices within a half mile radius in Shenzhen, ready to deliver the next day. In Detroit, you have maybe half a dozen, taking upward of a month to deliver. In Shenzhen, you can come up with a gadget in your head, walk down the street to have in prototyped within an hour, submit it to the government and have it tested, reviewed and approved by relevant agencies in 2 days, contract a factory at the outskirts of the city, and have it mass produced and hit the market before end of the week. In the US and EU, it sometimes take north of a year for the government to drag their heels alone, if you have something new that's not a derivative of an existing product. Everything is more efficient in China, the infrastructure, the support services, the manufacturers, and especially the government. It's synergy/critical mass, not cheap labor. Dismissing Chinese success as cheap labor robs you the chance of seeing, and copying what they did right, correcting what we did wrong. Protectionism only leaves us further behind.
Tell that to the Uighurs see how they feel about the forced labor camps in the solar industry.
@@andrewperkins1513 complete fiction.
Wow, thanks for the video
I once bump into the CEO of Genting group travelling in economy.
They are billionaires.
Genting is opening a casino in Las Vegas. They had a big casino in Singapore.
U must be some VVIP if u could talk to him.
Just recognise the face.....
Brilliant. Thank you.
Great video, but I think folks should also step back and recognize how solar is still far, far, far away from being as clean as we think it is. Those solar panels degrade and require a ton of space and without battery storage, solar is a pretty inefficient energy source.
Nuclear has its own set of issues, but is probably the most reliable CO2 free source of energy
I agree but I think both are part of the solution. More than just the two energy sources of course. 😁
Nuclear isn't CO2 free, just very low over the lifetime of a powerplant. More CO2/kWh than wind and hydro, lower than solar.
Any sort of fossil fuel energy is awful, of course.
As pv eficienty keeps increasing the amount of space they need decreases conciderably.
Over the last 10 years efficienty doubled. So only half the space is required to generate the same amount of energy. And that will happen again over the next decade. Add to that the continual decreasing price per panel, Enabling huge amounts of people and businesses to become energy independent. Panels easilly last 3 decades or more as well.
And while that is happening investment in battery production and development is trough the roof. We will be drowning in cheap storage pretty soon.
Nuclear is just way to expensive and political toxic to ever become a viable option again. If you can even find people willing to invest the amounts of money needed into it. Way to risky and it takes ages to see any return on investment.
@@grmasdfII CO2 per kWh or hydro is twice that of nuclear (24g vs 12g of CO2). Wind and nuclear are pretty comparable (11g vs 12g). All according to the IPCC report from 2014. More recent estimates by the UN put nuclear's emissions even lower at around 6g. Of course, solar and wind still need natural gas (several hundred gs of CO2) as backup when there's no wind or sun, as of now.
Why should one exclude the other? My parents had a 'bad roof' and refused electricity consumption by 30%. I have a good roof and the projected reduction is going to be 90-100% during the day.
Do you have any idea what the impact is of your backup source needing to cover 30-40% of your use at the good times, instead of 100% all of the time?
Most importantly it can be scaled down: I can't fit a nuclear reactor in my garage. I can put solar panels on my roof.
This means the electrical grid needs to be expanded less. Which is currently THE big killer for a nuclear future because you'd need a HUGE electric grid investment to get your electricity from a handful of locations.
i live in the state of Georgia (USA). Qcells has built several new plants here. vice president harris visited the one in Dalton,Ga this year. ///// Hanwha is the leading shareholder in REC Silicon, which announced that the entirety of its polysilicon supply coming out of Moses Lake, Washington, for the next 10 years will go to Qcells (approximately 3.6 GW annually). Qcells is also starting a 3.3-GW ingot, wafer, cell and panel manufacturing factory in Cartersville, Georgia, alongside its existing panel manufacturing sites in Dalton, Georgia. The company should have 8.4 GW of silicon solar panel capacity in the United States by the end of 2024.
Chinese made solar hardware inexpensive to many. Here in the Philippines 🇵🇭🇵🇭🇵🇭, almost all are Chinese made including mine installed whereas all are Chinese and it helped with the electric bill and power outage.
Soon the manufacturer will move to southeast asia due to cheaper wages
@@theburden9920 Making solar is almost all automated now. You don't have to pay machine.
pretty accurate and thorough.
strange logic: france can't get machine?japan can't enter the EU market? why China ? education,passion, administration without strange interruption.
maybe it's because china is now the 2nd largest market in the world and Germany sells a lot to china ....... even Mercedes Benz said China is their no.1 customer ..... so they got preferred ....... bottom line is it's business
@@tediberusa2098 but how China becomes the second economy. The education. It's not about the top level education, it's about average education.
1840：開門！ 自由貿易！
2020：開門！ 自由貿易！
10 years later this will happen to chips industry.
Hopefully China wins the semiconductor battle so video cards will be affordable again.
Good analysis,
One thing for sure, when looking at the big picture of globalization, cooperation has always been more quality/price effective than confrontation.
Indeed...a Macro 101 lesson that our politicians seem to forget
Wonderful video....and yes i am partly a beneficiary of the cost effective china made solar technology, was finally able to install a solar pv system on my residence rooftop..
As always, very comprehensive about business dynamics
Wonderful video.
Will there be a similar video on chips some years from now?
no
2025, China's .0125nm Chips are so cheap that disposable flip flops can be track.
not just 5 times the market price, but a guaranteed price, which started out at roughly 25 times the market value.
No unions. Cheap labor. Huge population willing to work. They will continue to win for now on.
China has unions.
That was a right comment 20 years ago. But now, there's union in China. The labour costs in China have gone up very quickly in recent years. Plus, there's 1 million of engineers graduated every year in China. The quality of China workers are elevating dramatically as well.
Thanks........ Very informative.!.!...
Here's a question on solar PVs.
Since they typically have an effective lifespan of around 25 years, what happens after that. Do they get dumped in landfills becoming like what plastic waste is to us today? Especially considering that not much of it can be recycled.
actually, solar panel recycling has come a long way, and the panels are roughly 93% recyclable. The frames are 100% recyclable, the glass is 95% reusable after being separated, and then thermal processing at 500 degrees Celsius allows the cells to be separated, and finally etching away the silicon wafers and smelting them back into usable slabs makes that portion 85% reusable. It's pretty sweet!
@@briangardner5899 plastic bottles are supposed to be highly recycleable too. But look where they end up. There needs to be a good discussion on sustainability too.
@@TubersAndPotatoes I think that's already getting adressed with the IEA PVPS guideline.
@@TubersAndPotatoes you can ask those questions about everything. That can easilly be fixed by regulation.
If youre on the internet already, why not type your question into a search bar instead of a comment section?
In 2024, it's amazing how rapid the global production of pure silicon continues to expand. Forecast is for Estimates are 600-650 GW of solar to be installed globally, a 55% year-over-year industry growth. (2023 growth was up 70% YoY).
It would be interesting to understand how such growth continues to be sustainable, from prospective of scaling up production, production efficiencies?
This guys videos are really good. Subscribed. Could you do a video about Shin-Etsu?
Great job 👏
"But first..." It makes my day man
Excellent video. Just a hint. Please pronounce niche as "neesh" instead of "nitch". Thanks.
You cannot blame people blaming their government when politics becomes the problem and not the solution.
Good points.