Gone Solar

A few fascinating solar power gems shine through in a recent Sacramento Bee article on Solar Power, Inc., a Roseville solar power company, how they are about to gross $50 million from a new solar PV installation.

The first gem is that the installation will be done eight thousand miles eastward, in Germany. Not anywhere near Roseville, not anywhere near the U.S. Of course, that should be expected in a nation unable to develop a coherent alternative energy policy, or for that matter, a coherent traditional energy policy. Next year we'll have different rules and different subsidies and the year after that we'll have a different Congress that'll scrap the programs with absolutely no continuity to get alternative energy built here on any meaningful scale.

The second gem is that the manufacturing will be done eight thousand miles westward, in China. Not anywhere near Roseville, not anywhere near the U.S. Of course, that should be expected in a nation unable to compete in the manufacturing sector.

How long do you suppose China will tolerate a solar company in the U.S. brokering deals between themselves and Germany, the two nations that 1) produce the most PV and 2) consume the most PV? What could a Roseville firm possibly provide that the Chinese or the Germans won't also be able to do in a few years time? The engineering? The financing? The marketing? The brokering? The installation? The project management? All of these things will soon be outsourced.

See, this is our role in the globalized world -- to manage the financial affairs of others while raking in money off the top, to broker the sales of goods manufactured by others to others while extracting more money off the top, and to spend that money buying cheap shit produced by foreign workers. That's a pretty good racket, wouldn't you say?

I can't imagine a scenario in the future where the Chinese won't just leapfrog right over the U.S. alternative power sector. PV from Shenzhen. Wind turbines from Hangzhou. Instead of a $750 165W solar panel from a U.S. based manufacturing facility in China, the Chinese are going to mass produce low quality $340 167W panels from their future locally owned plants and U.S. consumers are going to swallow them up, like they swallow up all those other cheap Chinese made products. Price is all that matters to us consumers. Our fledgling solar industry won't ever get off the ground. It will have gone to China.