All with Chinese panels I assume
Fear mongering about China seemingly has no end. Even their solar panels have some nefarious purpose, apparently.
Is Chinese spyware not a thing that exists? Is it only crazy conspiracy theorists that believe in this stuff, and so we should mock them?
Because if it was a real problem, this would be a good way to silence the criticism.
Well, kinda a problem if your objective was to not depend on dictatorships for energy
Strange, didn’t know that was in the renewable objective brief. I thought It was about reducing reliance on fossil fuels, not sticking it to chyna, silly me.
If you want to beat the Chinese at solar panels, you need to go back about ten years and find a couple million workers that will take $2/hr to make them.
I’ll look forward to updates on your progress towards this goal.
Australia sounds like it’s about to donate $2B to some grifters that are going to pretend they can do this domestically. They’ll take the money, produce nothing and live happily ever after.
Solar module production isn’t labour-intensive, much less intensive in low-skill labour.
A bit more than a decade ago, Germany was the #1 producer of solar panels, drastically pushing down prices with advances in technology, manufacturing, and automation. Then the government decided to slash all subsidies (mostly about capping feed-in tariffs for solar), without warning, and without phase-out. Noone was prepared for that kind of thing so all the companies went belly-up and the Chinese swooped in, buying the tech for cheap with money borrowed from the Chinese taxpayer and began to produce panels and sell them, again subsidised by state coffers. We later slapped them with anti-dumping tariffs but by then the domestic industry was already decomposing.
It’d stiff be cost-effective to build solar panels in Germany, the degree of automation is so high that higher wages balance out with higher transportation costs.
Australia though don’t get me started on Australia you’re structurally a 3rd world economy reliant on export of raw goods. You’re not even smelting that ore, just shovelling it onto ships.
