Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determined to perpetuate that crisis, if necessary by cutting off US imports of energy production infrastructure themselves now that the foreigners won't do it for them anymore.
The article vastly understates the rapidity of the change. It projects 3 TW of new renewable generation capacity in China over the next decade (02026-02036, I suppose), attributing that to an unpublished report from a consultancy that seems to protect its projections from criticism with an NDA. Given that the PRC installed 373 GW in renewable generation capacity last year (https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202501/28/cont...) this seems like an implausibly low figure; linear extrapolation of installing that same amount every year would give us 3.7 TW installed over that period. But in fact it has been growing exponentially, so 20 TW of added capacity over the next decade seems like a more likely ballpark.
That's nameplate capacity, so it's closer to 4 TW of actual energy generation.
Of course, most of said solar and battery tech was originally developed by Americans; chinese bought old patents, bought companies out of bankruptcy, and threw obscene amounts of state capital at developing it further. and now we're stuck with crap like CATL owning a huge amount of the advanced battery market. The implication that this is "just what the market decided" and that we must concede to the artificial scenario beijing has constructed, likely with the express intent of gaining leverage over more nations, is ridiculous.
Instead, we should mass-invalidate every single chinese-owned patent. She built her economy on stealing ours anyhow. Do it ourselves, or rely on allied/subordinate nations for manufacturing.
I strongly disagree with both your master-race theory of technical innovation and your imperialist rhetoric. Americans, and in particular people from the US, did contribute greatly to solar and battery technological innovation. But a great deal of it was carried out outside the US, or inside the US by non-Americans, and in particular by Chinese grad students at US universities. Technological and scientific progress is inherently an international effort on behalf of all of humanity.
In terms of bringing utility-scale battery storage and PV energy production to mass production, US elites have basically opted not to participate. Unfortunately I expect that situation to continue.
Withdrawing international intellectual-property monopolies en masse is an interesting suggestion; I think it would probably promote progress, in particular because it would free other countries around the world to do the same with US patents and copyrights, which have been among the most significant obstacles to progress and even simple preservation of knowledge.
It's not like being dependent on Saudi Arabia to supply oil. If China cuts us off from new solar panels, the solar panels we already have continue to provide electricity. It would only slow the rate of deployment, which we're already doing to ourselves by imposing a tariff on solar panel imports.
A large part of the German's military initiatives in WW2 were about obtaining access to oil, and the most successful Allied initiatives were about cutting off that oil.
We shoudln't let China overproduce and dump excess solar productions in its own attempts to control the market. We're trying to not repeat the energy dependence on unfriendly foreign powers. We don't want the Chinese Solar Embargo of 2026.
I think that this misreads how the Chinese solar industry works. It's one of the less government-controlled industries in China. It's fiercely competitive, which leads to low prices, rapid change, and periodic bankruptcies. Chinese-made solar panels became popular for the same reason their T-shirts and microwave ovens became popular: acceptable quality offered at unbeatable prices.
I also think that there's low risk of lock-in from buying Chinese solar products now. Solar panels have a typical operating lifetime about equivalent to 5 years at 100% of rated power. In practice this means something more like 20 years in a solar farm in a very sunny climate or 35 years in a cloudy climate. The steady state replacement rate to maintain a nation's solar capacity is therefore about 3%-5% of the initial installation rate. If China prohibited solar panel exports, Western countries could maintain existing solar farm capacity with only tiny outside-of-China solar manufacturing capacity. There would be plenty of time for not-China countries to determine if the embargo were temporary or persistent before investing in more expensive but more dependable domestic factories.
Promoting domestic PV panel production would be reasonable, but that's not what current US industrial policy is aimed at. Instead it's trying to resuscitate fossil fuels, like Tinkerbell, through sheer force of belief.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/china-solar-ener...
This is basically nonsense. Chinese solar panels are cheap because they are produced efficiently, with orders of magnitude less materials and energy than were required in 02012, when the US started imposing "anti-dumping" tariffs on them.
I've read many of the US Department of Commerce filings on the topic attempting to argue that the current prices are unfairly subsidized. The arguments are embarrassingly bad, arguing over things like what the fair price of solar glass should be, or whether the fair price of the labor of Chinese solar panel assembly workers should be determined by comparing to Malaysian electronics assembly labor or Romanian electronics assembly labor. (They settled on Turkish labor.)
Even when resorting to such absurd arguments, the countervailing tariffs the DoC decided it could justify were only in the range of 10-15%:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14...
Finding the original filings in these cases, spanning 13 years at this point, took a fair bit of digging, but it was very eye-opening. See for example https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3... and Barcode:4426784-02 C-570-011 (not linkable by any URL).
But, basically, you have to ask, if subsidies are the reason Chinese solar module prices today are lower than module prices were in 02012, when they cost €0.64 per peak watt instead of today's €0.110, does that mean that Chinese taxpayers are paying 82% of the cost of installing solar panels around the world? China is just exporting €100 billion a year of its tax revenues in the form of solar panels, with the intent of at some point raising the prices to above where they were in 02012, say €0.75 per peak watt? When should we expect that other shoe to drop?
Because the solar panel industries in other nations are pretty thoroughly destroyed, except for those created by Chinese companies seeking ways around US tariffs.
It just isn't a plausible story, even if it is being promoted by the same newspaper that promoted the story of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" to justify invading Iraq.
Don't really trust something advocating for deregulated energy markets to not mention the elephant in the room.
The current energy deregulation in the EU involves forcing utilities to trade electricity in a spot market, that treats the on-demand production of conventional power plants and the random and unpredictable production of solar and wind, as if it's completely equivalent. Of course, that's a fairly effective way to promote solar, as it's far more intrusive than conventional renewable mandates.
As far as I can see, "deregulation" means, "we regulate far more aggressively than before, but there's now a market in there where Wall Street types can make money".
The California case also forced utilities to trade electricity in a spot market. These markets always seem oriented towards purchasing power rather than capacity, which strikes me as odd. Power companies need committed capacity, because they need to have reserves of power. Sure, buying electricity that no one else is using makes sense, but because demand is comparatively inelastic, it's just crazy to have that be how companies ensure they have sufficient capacity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California...
Deregulating an industry to achieve a specific goal is certainly one approach.
In my country healthcare, child support, energy, national railway, postal services, public housing, banking and more have all been privatized.
I worry about this. Not for now, but for 20 years in the future, where all energy is managed by companies and the government can no longer control the market due to being 'too big too fail' and because it gave all control away.
> Deregulated markets, which might be better described as “differently regulated” markets, separate these concerns. Independent power producers (generators) build and sell electricity wholesale to Retail Electric Providers (REPs), who sell to households, while utilities manage the transmission and infrastructure.
On the face of it this makes sense to me. Deregulation doesn't mean there are no regulations at all. It means we split up a monolithic entity into different parts that can each be subject to competitive forces and be regulated differently.
Companies want to maximize profit and minimize cost, while customers want as much as possible for the lowest price.
Neither public services nor private enterprise is a silver bullet to everything.
It just takes way longer to reach market equilibrium than free-market advocates claim. And by way longer, I mean years or even decades rather than months or weeks, which means a lot of suffering or externalities during the transitional period.
Healthcare was once deregulated in the U.S. And it was fine. And it would be again if we deregulated healthcare, but it would take more than a decade and nobody has the stomach for that. (And nobody has yet made a compelling case to demonstrate that a deregulated healthcare system would be a sufficient improvement over what we have now to justify the suffering that the changeover would cause.)
In China, the government has the goal of deploying as much energy as possible as cheaply and fast as possible, and promoting their own industries too. Which means tons and tons and tons of renewables.
While (centralized, government) industrial policy has played a key role in making its renewable energy sector so utterly dominant, the sector thus created is more decentralized and privatized than in even the US.
If we stopped buying shit we don't need, they could easily turn off a good portion of their coal powered electricity plants if they wanted.
None of this serves anyone but the ruling class and deep state. War with China is going to be one that the US loses.
It looks into the numbers for the Texas renewable buildout, and there's a very important caveat: the amount of renewables you build is not the relevant metric. Emission reduction is. And Texas does not succeed there.
Power in California is from the Western Interconnect, which is regulated by WECC.
Power on the Western Interconnect is only 8.7% solar and 10.4% wind.[0]
Texas in the same year was 7% solar and 24% wind.[1]
[0] https://wecc-spdp-weccgeo.hub.arcgis.com/pages/power-generat...
[1] Annoyingly the data is in an excel spreadsheet in a zip file https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2021/03/10/FuelMixReport_Pr...
Are you saying they would have released less CO2 had they installed natural gas power plants instead?
Because that's the point of this article isn't it? To follow Texas policies, not California's, by pointing to absolute numbers of renewables.
If they looked at absolute numbers on coal and gas they'd look worse.
If we're talking about the impact of a particular tech, choosing the proper baseline is important, otherwise it's easy to reach fallacious results in counterfactual reasoning.
Emission reduction versus what? Per-capita emissions reductions? Per-kWh emissions reductions? Compared to whose usage?
Plotting total emission and saying "we've failed!" actually hides a lot of what's going on, it's only one aspect, and increased population can hide that overall emissions are trending in the right way.
The price competitive producers were all stable fossil fuels, natural gas and coal.
They failed to take into account unreliable low cost producers forcing reliable but marginally more expensive producers out of the market.
If solar/wind producers had to guarantee power 24x7 at fixed rates the cost would vastly exceed natural gas costs.
They just need to change the contract requirements to match reality.
Absent turning the Texas energy market into a more rational design (I was part of the energy market during dereg, these failures were predicted by our energy economists at the time), the state should mandate weatherization for wind generation at a minimum, and look into grid-scale battery requirements as prices fall and technologies mature.
Solar and wind are fantastic opportunistic power generators that work well together and should be a significant part of any grid's energy mix going forward, but the state needs to act like every other power market and pay for spinning fossil fuel capacity for shoulder and peak demand. Picking energy mix winners and losers is just political meddling in what was supposed to be a free market environment.
and in process lower your household energy need
BY INCREASING comfort.
BREEAM / Passive house.... In passive house in norway (alaska of europe) you can be 3 days without electricity(or gas or any other heating medium) and in coldest of cold days you do not need to put sweater on, because it is still comfortable, heat is not escaping as fast.
so there is deregulation of market and there is not educated customer + educated regulation which bankrupts your company if you build trash like they mostly build in USA. so it is not only energy, there are other regulation not in sync with reality/human nature.
and by lowering your household energy needs(by increasing comfort), higher ratio of renewables can be used cheaply or even onsite/roof.
and your energy requirement can be manipulated more in time i.e. you can heat house few degrees more few days in advance. after you see on tv that next few days will be cloudy/stormy/ hurricane/frost... or just make app do that for you
or you can heat your hot water at noon where electricity prices are almost 0$
so less effort providing energy for household is, more effort can be put into providing energy for business
I think Texas' market right now is completely disproving that point. The amount of batteries being deployed everywhere are showing that storing solar/wind for a fraction of the day is going to be a lot cheaper than having tons of gas.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-markets/texas-bi...
I am sure businesses that follow the administration's wishes will get government contracts, tax rebates, tariff exceptions, and other favorable treatment. I am not worried, the vast majority of businesses will learn within a few months that it is financially profitable to bend the knee.
Regulation in territories where it is harder for corporations to buy politicians seems to be far more successful at driving improvements.
We are in an era where clean energy is the cheapest energy, and the biggest impediment to the transition is merely being allowed to put the energy on the grid. Go around the country, and the queue to get interconnected to the grid is one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Another huge stumbling block is the procedure for acquiring new electricity generation assets, typically done through IRPs for five years out, based on out-dated data. This is the "standard" regulatory regime in the US, though its highly fractured and there are many many variations.
In this highly "regulated" environment, the corporations have already completely captured the market, and have often bribed the Public Utility Commissions to achieve their own goals.
Deregulation in Texas means less corporate capture, more of a chance for smaller startups to deploy, and a faster energy transition now that the cheapest technology is clean technology.
It doesn't clearly tie the choice of business model to the way the businesses are regulated, so it fails to support the claim that regulation is the cause of the lack of solar adoption. The examples it uses to make its case, the TVA and the state of Texas, are also not great.
The TVA is owned by the government. So the question of their pivot to solar power is more of a political question than an economic one. Is there any political will to spend tax dollars pivoting the TVA away from nuclear and hydro sources to solar? Which politicians support/reject the policy and why?
Texas is also not a great example given the recent tragedies arguably resulting from their lack of regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
In-line with other comments, Enron is a classic case-study of the consequences of allowing free markets unfettered control over essential infrastructure.
> TVA benefits from existing capex in large nuclear and hydro plants, enjoys low rates, and has little incentive to change.
So apparently TVA has already invested in large nuclear and hydro and doesn't need more power. It's not about to build more solar so that it can shut down its nuclear or hydro plants. No business will cannibalize itself like this. It will have to a different economic entity.
> Regulated utilities can also sign PPAs, but the lengthy and complex regulatory approvals make the process so cumbersome that few investors or developers actually pursue this option.
Regulated entities can theoretically do this, but they are cumbersome so they don't.
The article also mentions the tragedy of the 2021 crisis, along with the 2020 blackouts in California; the article says it's a matter of extreme weather, not the failure of a specific type of energy market.
> I'm not read into the details of PPA regulations. There may be a good point there about how some/all of them are too onerous which de-incentivizes change. idk.
> ensuring that companies we entrust with providing critical infrastructure are resilient to extreme weather is a matter of regulation. I think that the Texas and California examples were both specific instances of regulatory failures regardless of their ambient culture of regulation.
At the same time, long term investments into fossil fuels and atomic energy are forbidden!
Saying "deregulated" energy markets drive solar, is another level of evil. It is logic that drove dependency on Russian natural gas!
but people seem to fall in trap of not thinking about user/customer.
if pv is so cheap that it can pay itself in 6-7 years, by customer lowering his draw from grid drastically most of the time, whole energy transition will not be so painful for other participants of market. wast majority of thinking is going to energy providers, not a lot of thinking is going to changing customers habits ( of which most energy intense can be automated and either spread out or concentrated towards time when energy is cheap - you know sun will be shining tomorrow or day after, renewables are not as unpredictable)
customers and provider can cooperate.
and so " In EU renewable are not competitive.." for whom? for energy providers ? Or for customer which can easily and cheaply lower his energy draw from grid by 70% most of year by installing solar pv hot water heater + heatpumpin for 7 months of cooling his house from pv? even before installing batteries? (just electric hot water heater)
The energy crisis that happened in EU demonstrated to me that citizens are not willing to have a free market for the energy grid. When a single month cost as much as a whole year, and companies are unable to fulfill contracts or have to shut down, then their anger is not directed at the commercial companies in charge of solar, wind or other type of energy plants. It is directed towards the government for failing to provide basic function of society, which apparently include a reasonable priced electricity.
Absolute numbers are not the right metric when one of the states doesn't care about efficiency and decides to generate more and more electricity. Then absolute number are huge but percentages of renewal are very low.
