Comments on: Production Scale (Not Cheap Labour) Gives China Solar Advantage

By: JamesWimberley

JamesWimberley — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 23:18:00 +0000

What´s the optimum size for a solar PV plant? 1GW a year? It´s not like steel where the economies of scale keep going and the supergiant integrated mills like POSCO´s are the cheapest. As solar panel production expands from 35 GW/year to >100 GW over the next five years, we may see something more like the global car industry, with quite large but not monstrous assembly plants scattered over the world in major markets. They will all be run by Chinese corporations.

By: Ivor O'Connor

Ivor O'Connor — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 22:58:00 +0000

So if we had ore mined here in America in huge quantities.
By machines so we would not have labor costs.
And if we had a steel industry to melt that ore.
Again by machines so our prices would not skyrocket.
And if we also had glass factories.
And if we did our own massive wafer fabrications.
With no EPA to tell us about the waste.

Then all we would have to do is make a huge PV fabrication plant of a scale rivaling the Chinese to compete against them?

Hmmm…. I’ll think about it.

By: Shiggity

Shiggity — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 20:08:00 +0000

Making solar pv really isn’t labor intensive at all. When you look into a modern PV factory there are hardly any people inside it.

Making a standard mono-crystalline cell is actually quite easy from a manufacturing standpoint, like steel or concrete.