Instead of just building up a solar industry themselves and creating actual jobs… Just tie benefits to the product being made in USA and Partner Countries…
A decent portion of the US solar industry already is. The problem is that while the US might be able to satisfy its own needs, maybe, it turns out that investing into actually building enough new factories to turn out more panels a year that the entire us electrical demand is liable to make some big economies of scale, and give you a very profitable export market.
Given that major conservative donate like Shell and BP are busy campaigning for putting economic restrictions on african countries that are trying to buy chinese solar instead of US natural gas, i’d imagine that this is a natural PR route to take.
Of course the US could have used our experience in silicon to build thouse largely automated massive solar factories ourselves, but when we talk about building solar capacity it’s allways talked about as an ‘great economic burden’ placed on the government though ‘expensive subsidies’.
Solar panels are a cheap mass market based on scale and a relativly cheap workforce. It is all about scale and the US has no natural advantage in it, I can see. That is not to say it is a bad idea, but it propably is smarter to help poorer countries allied with the US to make them, like say Mexico and then import them.
I don’t really think the US has any natural disadvantage in solar cell production either. While the process has diverged more and more significantly in the last decade or so in search of higher efficiency, at the end of the day solar cells are just a specialized type of computer chip, and share the same production chain. The process is highly automated, and the US had the experience required.
While there is a naritive of deindustrialsation in the US, it is worth noting that this is relative. In real terms there are more manufacturing jobs today in the US than there were in the sixties, they’ve just haven’t grown at the same rate as the service sector.
Advantage wise, the US used to be the world leader in solar technology, it’s industry having created many of the processes China would latter need to import and catch up in before they could pull ahead of. The US government also has the capital to spend and invest on a scale not matched by most other nations, but is unlikely to spend that sort of money on subsidizing a foreign nation’s manufacturing capacity. Combined with the sort of private capital it can move with even minor incentives, i’d say the US had a huge advantage when it comes to massively scaling up a high tech manufacturing process, what it lacked was any sort of coherent long term direction, often on purpose.
The US advantages in manufactring are basicly a very well trained labour force, with a lot of top engineers and scientists, a massive local market and homebias. You can ship solar panels easily so the local market is not that important and home bias matters less for large company customers, who are the big buyers in solar. As for the well trained work force that really helps in designing the machines making solar panels, but for the manufacturing we are talking relativly cheap machines anybody can buy from China and a lot of not so skilled jobs with some medium skilled ones. Basicly every middle income country can compete in it. The only big advantage is in polysilicon, which requires cheap electricity. However other countries then the US have that as well.
I have no doubt that if the US governments wants to do it, the US is capable of doing it. However it is not obvious to me that anything, but making the tools and maybe polysilicon has a natural advantage in the US at all. You get cheaper workers abroad, who have the skills.
I’m not saying no one else could do it obviously, we’re talking about something China straight up did, mearly that if the US wanted in, it could have gotten in. The process is not that sensitive to labor prices and so gets limited benefit from being in a poorer country. Easily the largest constraint on scaling has been the start up capital, and most poor countries don’t have the kind of capital required. The US does.
The US had first mover advantage, we’ve been building cells for specialized applications at scale since the 70s. We could have turned that leed into a massive supply of cheap panels for export in the two thousands, but instead threw it away in favor of more government fossil investment and now taking about an article where conservatives are wining about it.
