L'Emmerdeur wrote:Seth wrote:L'Emmerdeur wrote:Seth wrote:Er, the only problem is wind can never replace coal or gas because it's not reliable. And it's ugly. And it takes an enormous investment in land that cannot be used for anything else.
And the most compelling reason is because it can never supply the necessary amount of electricity to keep a technological society running without festooning every square foot of the country with giant, ugly towers.
Wind is only one of the energy sources that will help with the inevitable replacement of fossil fuels. The price of solar is
dropping,
Not really. The short-term cost of panels has dropped because the Chinese are dumping solar panels onto the world market but that won't last. While solar is far less intrusive than wind farms it suffers from the same failure that wind does: it's cyclical and the energy cannot be stored for use when demand is high. Oil and gas, by the way, are nothing more than stored solar energy, or had that fact escaped you?
Not once the Chinese wipe out panel production elsewhere and then it either jacks the prices or simply stops exporting panels in order to wage economic warfare, something it has a long, long history of doing.
By the way, you misread this citation, which says that the PRICE of solar energy, which is to say the price that is paid to the individual who owns the solar system, is in decline, not the COST of building and maintaining a system:
The continued decline comes even as the price of photovoltaic modules – commonly known as solar panels – which represent one of the highest single equipment costs in solar energy systems, have remained relatively steady since 2012.
Your dishonest approach to debate is pathetic and amusing. Unlike you, I read the articles rather than just skimming for nuggets that appeared to support my position.
In the second article, where you got your quote, it clearly states what is being described: "price drops for solar energy systems." It also states that there are studies showing that the price is likely to continue to drop.
Well, yeah. That's my point. You still don't seem to understand that a "price drop" is not a good thing because the "price" they are referring to is the price that the grid pays for excess power generated by the home solar installation. Go read it again. The author was exceedingly clumsy in his writing in not making it more clear that by "price drop" he didn't mean a drop in the cost of installing a system, he meant a drop in the price of electricity generated by such systems.
This gives the lie to your attempt to obfuscate by selective quotation. In addition it describes the primary reasons for the decrease in price, which do not include "the Chinese are dumping solar panels." It seems you failed to notice that the section you quoted shows that the supposed "Chinese dumping" has had no appreciable effect on the price of solar panels since 2012.
Um, the point of the article was to make it clear that it has become LESS AFFORDABLE for homeowners to install solar systems because what they get paid for excess capacity by the grid (the "price") is in decline, which increases the length of time it takes for that power sold to the grid to pay for the capital costs of installing the system, which is a major factor in deciding to install it in the first place. BECAUSE of Chinese dumping of cheap panels into the market the cost of solar panels HAS NOT COME DOWN as one might expect it to if sales of solar panels was stimulating production and prices were being driven by competition. The problem is that the Chinese dump inferior, but cheap solar panels into the US, which puts US panel manufacturers (and European ones) out of business because their costs of production are much higher, not having legions of slave laborers working for pennies a day to build them. So, rather than the free market driving panel prices down as manufacturers compete for customers by improving manufacturing efficiency and cutting costs, competitors to the Chinese simply go out of business, leaving pretty much the entire market to the Chinese, who have been keeping prices abut the same since 2012. Once all the competition has been eliminated, China will have a monopoly on solar panel production and will be able to charge whatever the hell it wants.
But, it won't because its objective is NOT to provide the world with solar panels, it's to manipulate the markets so as to profit from its panel production so as to improve its ability to produce cheap solar panels
for its own domestic use. In other words, purchasers of Chinese panels are subsidizing the building of their panel production capacity which they intend to allocate to themselves. Their EXPORT prices will NEVER come down from where they are so long as they are the dominant producers because they don't care about saving us money, they want all our money to pay for their much cheaper domestic distribution of solar panels. If they can drive all the other panel producers out of business, which isn't hard because it's damned expensive to build a solar panel plant, then the rest of the world will essentially be funding all of China's solar power plans by paying outrageous export-only prices while the Chinese pay almost nothing domestically.
That's what China does with pretty much everything important. They get us to pay to build the plants and then they overcharge us so they can themselves get the stuff really cheaply and plentifully. Eventually China can control entire economies and nations simply by threatening to cut off exports entirely because they have become the sole-source providers of essential technologies.
That's precisely why Donald Trump wants to take on China now. He's a businessman and he sees the threat quite clearly. Even Apple has just intimated that it might move iPhone manufacturing back to the US for exactly the reasons I mention.
Your mendacious yammering is tiresome; apparently other members of this site enjoy indulging you but I don't see a point to dealing with any more of it on this topic.
Your inability to comprehend basic free market economics, much less the complex political and economic situation with China makes it pretty useless, yes. But I'll still try to get through to you that what you read doesn't mean what you think it means, and if you'd read the title of the article you might understand that.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
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