How China Dominates The World’s Solar PV Supply
August 8, 2022
By Paul Homewood
.A new report from the IEA shows just how much China dominates the Solar PV industry:
Let’s look at some of the charts.
The first set show how far China’s dominance has increased since 2010, particularly on wafers and polysilicon, the early stages of the manufacturing stage:
And frighteningly that dominance is expected to continue growing:
China’s dominance is built on lower costs, the result of low electricity costs, lack of environmental standards and what amounts to slave labour. It is fundamentally clear that the West cannot compete on China’s terms, leaving the dilemma of strategic overdependence on China or much higher solar panel costs.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Paul
Surely we already know all this, or apparently those of us not in Government or a green organisation or the MSM know these facts?
The idea that hundreds of thousands of green UK jobs will be created surely means those will replace Chinese ones, and that isn’t going to happen.
We are shoveling huge sums of money Chinas way in order to buy these weather dependent inefficient renewables allowing it to become ever more threatening and powerful, but no one in power seems concerned.
I can only endorse that and have being saying much the same thing for months if not years.
The main situation government has to deal with (apart from an appalling level of scientific ignorance) is that the “green blob” are the world’s best at a combination of straightforward obfuscation with a mixture of ‘find the lady’ and occasional helpings of “ooh, look! a squirrel!”
By the time anyone in government is half way through reading this report — and their normal attention span does not encourage optimism! — their minds will have been diverted onto some other subject less likely to tax their brains and more to the liking of the blob.
Intellectually we *know* what the Chinese are up to but if we ignore them it might all come out right in the end. And you’re wrong, climatereason, some people power are concerned, just not concerned enough to do anything that might rock the boat or staunch the flow of Chinese cash — and influence — into UK universities.
The cost we pay for not manufacturing our own more expensive solar modules and wind turbines?
We’re now paying £500 monthly energy bills.
Our government has screwed up every aspect of our energy security policy, culminating in this utter disaster, since Blair.
I hear from friends around the world (mostly far east ironically) that there’s no problem with their energy cost’s, they can’t understand what all the fuss is about.
Generations of hubris and arrogance whilst within the EU has proven our undoing from the moment we left.
Instead of building our country, May and Boris decided to virtue signal that we are the worlds great green power and could influence the rest of the world on energy policy, when our own energy means are so limited.
No one else has done this to us, but us.
You have to wonder whether the Chinese threat not to cooperate on climate will extend to export bans on solar PV and battery grade lithium carbonate. They have previously banned rare earth exports to Japan, so they have form.
If I was your potential enemy and you were dependent on me for your solar panels I’d figure out a way of including some techie switch that could stop them generating if I thought you were getting an upper hand. Let’s face it, Russia has started to switch the gas off, why couldn’t China figure our how to switch off all your solar panels?
The same applies to any appliance made there. It’s a potential downside of the “Internet of Things”.
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Oh how sad if there were no more solar panels being made.
More shocking than the concentration of supply in China is the concentration of demand in Europe visible in the upper diagram. The first is at least a rational response to the market, the latter the product of wilful policies which have little or no rational basis. See the recent Global Warming Policy Foundation report No 52, “Europe’s Green Experiment: a costly failure in Unilateral Climate Policy” for a close up-to-date examination of this aspect. By the way, I rather doubt that the millions working in that industry in China really think of themselves as slave labour, at least by comparison with the way of life led by their grandparents.
You might want to read up about China’s treatment of the Uighers in that province which accounts for so much output.
Dependence on the weather and seasons for electricity is complete stupidity and making yourself as a country vulnerable is idiocy.
The late Professor David Mackay said it all in his final interview: i.e., that by ignoring simple arithmetic, the use of Weather Dependent Renewable energy to try to power a developed country is “an appalling delusion”
No one was listening.