Falling panel prices lead to global solar boom, except for the US

I have to agree with you. I've heard competing claims that Musk is doing, with Tesla, something similar to what he did with Hyperloop: Promise a futuristic but ultimately impractical solution to forestall those trying to proceed with proven solutions (i.e. bullet trains) that might compete with his own business.

However, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the above paragraph ascribes genius to what is more simply explained by incompetence. It's more likely Musk believed he could make Hyperloop work, but couldn't. Similarly...

- Musk thought he could buy an election and gain the inside track for his companies, but was too witless to maintain good relations with the politician he bought.

- He bought Twitter seemingly on a lark and proceeded to rapidly run it into the ground.

- He put a bunch of script-kiddies in charge of DOGE, which promptly made a mess of an entire government and created a historically massive deficit while gutting government services.

- He alienated the core customer demographics that had formerly been one of Tesla's mains sources of income. (The other being government grants and subsidies which... whoops.)

Now, Tesla's shareholders are weighing whether or not a man with Musk's recent track record is worth a trillion dollar pay package[1]. It's gobsmacking that they even need to think about this.

So, no, Musk is not some evil genius undoing green energy by deliberately creating a false solution that fails to deliver. He's just a garden variety mediocrity who has been promoted far past his capabilities or character and has been utterly undone by the resulting ego trip. He's an object lesson in just how much damage the wrong person in the right place and time can do to the world.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/musk-could-leave...

Musk is a nogo poisoned brand in Europe... that damage his needless psychotic attacks have done won't be forgotten anytime soon. I'd happily buy chinese car instead of tesla just because of above, if prices were same. But they are far from same, and seeing their progress they may soon be better products overall.

Musk chronically over-promised and terminally under-delivered. There was no world where he didn't end up being a twit, just one where we aren't stupid enough to fall for his lies.

Tesla, in particular, boils down to how Americans respond to marketing. We love the idea of buying organic, environmentally-friendly technology that makes us part of the solution. It doesn't matter if Congolese children are dying in the cobalt mines to make EV-grade lithium ion batteries, us Americans need to virtue signal with our wallet. Buy the latest iPhone, save up for a Tesla, it's all part of the new-age jewelry we wear to make ourselves feel worth something.

It was damn good marketing.

> If only Musk didn't turn out to be such a twitt, Tesla was really supposed to be part of the solution but somehow Musk managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

this was never going to happen. the capitalist class are never going to be the ones to get us out of debt; they cause and benefit from it. it's his entire business model.

I mean... sort of.

But let's look at the structure for a bit...

- Citizens United has allowed unfettered amounts of dark money to flow into our elections, disproportionately benefiting the uber wealthy

- The Senate greatly favors rural states, sometimes 60 - 1 by vote weight

- The House is pretty much a race to the bottom in terms of gerrymandering, where many districts are pretty much unloseable

- Many states purge rolls and make it harder to vote by closing polling places, restricting early access, adding id requirements, and restricting mail in voting. Combined with the fact that election day is on a random Tuesday which we don't take off as a nation to go vote

- Education is... not in a great place. Many many people have _no idea_ how the system works at all, or what's happening within it day to day. But they are getting inundated with 7 second flashes of information and misinformation on infinite feeds which bubble their users, lead them to increasingly extreme content, and make it hard to distinguish between fact and fiction

So yea, he's well understood in that half the country has no idea he's all over Epstein's list and think the felonies he's been charged with are bogus while cheering on the prosecution of Letitia James for renting out an apartment that said she could rent it out in the contract she signed

And we voted for him in the sense that only 7 states seem to matter in our presidential elections, and we're constantly inundated with information about how our votes barely matter cause of all the imbalances in elections at every level

Much less well understood by folks who get their news from Fox News, News Max, or bro podcasts.

This is a mischaracterization of the liability of PG&E for those fires. All of the PG&E-caused wildfires were due to inadequately maintained equipment operating well beyond its service life. The reduction of maintenance budgets to improve free cash flow and return capital to investors was a conscious decision by the company officers [1].

As you stated, PG&E was held liable for billions of dollars of compensation for the impacted people. This led to negative earnings zeroing out the profits of the previous decade [2]. Furthermore, the stock's price is far lower than it was during the hayday of deferred maintenance.

Since the involvement of California state government in PG&E operations, maintenance has improved dramatically. Furthermore, PG&E again has positive earnings, demonstrating that the long-term viability of the company is improved with adequate maintenance budgeting.

Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically [3].

1. How PG&E missed its chance to prevent the Camp Fire: Damning report on utility’s negligence, https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24357122...

2. Pacific Gas & Electric EPS - Earnings per Share 2011-2025 | PCG, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...

3. Human-caused ignitions spark California’s worst wildfires but get little state focus: In 2019, utilities turned off electricity during high-wind events, and California had its mildest fire season in eight years. Was that a coincidence?, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2020/01/05/human-caused...

PG&E instead of constantly upgrading and maintaining their distribution system, decided to pay out dividends and buy back stock, as well as pay their CEO $50 million per year. That's why their outdated equipment kept starting fires.

They took a risk by underspending on upgrading, and we as Californians are paying for them paying out their shareholders.

Basically PG&E was horribly mismanaged for decades, that mismanagement lead to billions of dollars of damages and those costs were shifted onto the customers and the management got off scot free.

There are a bunch of places in California where humans shouldn't live that PG&E is required to provide electricity to and then getting blamed for setting fires... which I suppose it did set those fires but much of the state is being required to subsidize these inhabited uninhabitable places either through paying for fire damage or paying the incredibly expensive process of burying power lines which doesn't fundamentally alter the risk or rate of wildfires.

One of the many questionable political situations in California.

The arbitrage opportunities here are insane. You should install an electric charger or two in your front yard and charge people 50-100% premiums to use your power :)

I live 20 minutes north of you. My power is in fact 4 times expensive in the winter.

BRB, Shopping on amazon for a 20-mile long extension cord

Palo Alto municipal power right?

I moved across the road from this government owned power company so i was just out of Palo Alto municipality and suddenly had to pay 4x the price. Sigh.

It's a weird thing moving to the USA. Everyone's been brainwashed "anything government run is more expensive" yet every example I've ever looked into proved the opposite to a dramatic extent. Government run institutions lead to lower overall costs.

I thought maybe you were in Santa Clara, but you've got even better rates than that.

https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

NEM eligibility is controlled by CPUC, not PG&E

In my area, the government passed the law prohibiting replacement or installation of new gas appliances starting a year and a few months from now.

https://www.finegroupre.com/blog/no-more-gas/

This is all the while cost of the alternative -- electric power -- goes up at least 10% YOY

A lot of new homes don't have natural gas hookups, and there's been various state and local regulations wrt natty gas applicances

I'm guessing they're talking about phasing out natural gas in some places?

Why so?

And the sad thing this will just lead to a vicious cycle of protectionism for these companies. Their quality will decline. They’ll be more expensive than global products. US consumers will be the ones that suffer

On the other hand if I can buy a house for $75k, it might be worth it.

Wow why do Japanese consumers buy those computers over the cheaper MacBooks and foreign PCs?

The USA is a services based country, not manufacturing. Call me when Big Finance, Big Law, Consulting and Big Tech are threatened. Right they're doing quite splendid with cash rich piles.

Yes, they've been using the Japanese model since 2020, and Japan only got there by making many huge mistakes. But essentially growth is dead and the entrenched businesses aren't going anywhere, they won't innovate and they won't be allowed to die, zombies.

Well, in order to compete, they'd have to cut costs.

You can't cut costs infinitely. You still need to pay people, suppliers, and above all, people who had nothing to do with the company but hold a piece of paper saying they're entitled to profits.

It's probably the case that you cannot do that enough to compete with the Chinese if you're in the US, so they won't try.

We're in a post-"what about the long term economic outlook of our country"-era and have been since the 1970s. John Q. Public in the US and Helga Öffentlich in Germany don't care that their purchase of a Chinese EV hollows out their country's industrial base, they just care that they spent less on the EV. And why shouldn't they? The countries themselves are lead by people who do the exact same thing on a massive scale.

The primary risk that China's auto industry poses is to Japan, South Korea, and the few parts of Europe with large scale auto manufacturing.

The US domestic auto industry was hollowed out decades ago. Germany's domestic auto industry is just starting to be hollowed out, that process is in the early days. China's auto rise will ravage European manufacturing, not US manufacturing. Auto manufacturing is a small share of the US industrial base, it's a large share of the German industrial base for example.

Boeing and Airbus will both lose large chunks of their global airplane business to cheaper Chinese competition over the coming decades. It's definitely not exclusive to Boeing. The US airline market is far more lucrative than the European airline market, US carriers like Delta are very profitable and can more or less be forced to not buy from China.

hybrids are option (b), a dead end parochial technology. Pure evs will strand that technology very quickly. BYD already has 1000v / 5min charge.

Doesn't change your overall point, but just to comment on the Fiesta case (of interest to me since I drove one of the first model year's return to North America - 2011 - until earlier this year) - it only survived 4 extra years outside of NA - it's discontinued worldwide as of 2023.

The surviving vehicle(s) on the platform are the Ford Puma and Puma Gen-E, which are subcompact crossovers not sold in North America.

GM sold 4M cars in China in 2017, its peak year. While BYD is indeed eating their lunch, they still sold 1.8M cars in China last year: https://stockdividendscreener.com/auto-manufacturers/gm-chin...

American brands were considered prestigious as I understand it.

Some Ford models still compete with Asian cars in foreign markets. Smaller Ford models mainly, but the Falcon was popular with a certain demographic.

Chinese people bought about 1.8 million GM cars last year, which is down significantly from about 10 years ago before BYD and other domestic brands started putting out competitive alternatives but far from 0.

Tesla is a US company?

> more solar means they can sell more gas/oil to everyone else

A glut in supply drives prices down. Oil extraction and refining doesn't have constant costs, as it is heavily dependent on geography as well as the physical characteristics of oil itself.

This is why there was a 3 way gas price war between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia in the 2010s.

A fun one is ask and Australian

How much it costs to sell a house. Then tell him in that in the US it's 6% of the sales price.

How much it costs to install solar and heat pumps.

The fact that the US shifted their pollution away from something that causes obvious to anyone issues like acid rain to something that is more easily deniable makes it easy to deny climate change. The hole in the ozone layer stopped growing as well. Maybe it will take that level of problems to start in the US again for changes to happen??

There was already an op-ed writer during Dubya's admin (remember when he was the dumbest president?) writing how their denial and non-investment in green tech was going to lead to China to be leaders in that space.

Sigh, without the Brooks Brothers "riot", the guy people insulted for talking about climate change would've been president...

Why not? China has/had the problem in their own backyard and we're likely acutely aware of the impact it has. Wouldn't that hasten their need to come up with alternative solutions?

Meanwhile the US is full of hubris and can't see beyond their own nose.

I'll care when they hit (inflation-adjusted to now) 10ct/Wp for n-topcon (or better) glass-glass framed modules FOB by the truck/container load.

Because that (in Rotterdam) is the normal for central Europe these days. Except that they're already in a warehouse/container pile after their ocean voyage.

But solar panels are undergoing involution in China while there is mass youth unemployment. Alot of these are zombie companies selling at a loss and propped by provincial debt.

You're measuring success only in with regards to how it might benefit you as a foreigner, but dosen't necessarily mean it was wholly successful for the China.

We'd be similarly behind with self-driving tech if it wasn't for the endless investment by megacorps.

I’d be curious how much of the goal of the tariffs is for solar actually produced in those countries vs just slightly modified goods from China. That’s one reason tariffs don’t work when they aren’t applied universally

I don’t doubt that another benefit is the current admin just simply doesn’t like solar of course

Solar is actually viable in places like Alaska and Finland. It just isn't viable in the winter, but in the summer it is extra viable. Greenhouses (another form of solar) also work wonders in Alaska, and outside they can grow the biggest pumpkins you'll ever see anywhere.

Are batteries cheaper than pumping water up hill?

*as long as there's no tariffs involved and no entrenched power monopolies taxing folks for installing solar. Looking at you, Southern Power Company.

Carful when saying it’s not cheaper, it’s generally profitable to add some batteries to a solar power plant.

The economics on storage only kicks in after scaling the grid with a lot of solar, but adding solar to that point is itself profitable almost anywhere.