There is a massive opportunity for the US in the next 5-10 years to take advantage of a Slow Adopter advantage by only now truly taking advantage of the technological and cost advances made in the past 5-10 years.
Now that the public has heard the term “Trillions” whether it relates to defense spending or company valuations, that term is now somewhat more meaningless for grand scale ideas. Couple that with rising energy costs and you have a potential public appetite for a massive push for renewable and storage of all kinds.
The biggest difference now is that the tech and scale are here now. The prices are dropping like a rock for grid storage, thanks to China. Sodium-ion battery production is being ramped up.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.
You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.
> solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance
Most countries have days to, at most, months of imports of oil in reserve. In contrast, a panel embargo wouldn’t have disastrous effects for years. But reliance it is the same. If you’re dependent on Chinese panels, China can cap your energy growth at whim. The degradation will be slow thereafter, but present nevertheless.
Using foreign panels for anything other than bootstrapping domestic or allied production would be the EU repeating its follies first with Russia and then with American LNG.
Stopping new panels in some hypothetical scenario is very different than stopping fossil fuel delivery when ch can stop ongoing energy production - it not even in the same timescale of problem
What are the alternatives for Europe? Continue to import oil and gas? Have some of your most important economic inputs price and supply controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs alive?
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
Not the panel itself, but the firmware of the solar panel charge controller and inverter that's connected to the Internet because there's an app to monitor the system. I wouldn't bet that there aren't remote kill switches deep inside that firmware.
"However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.
Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said."
It would not suprise me if not only Chinese manufacurers did this. Cellular modems are cheap and and the capability to cause blackout is very usefull.
My Chinese built inverter functions just fine without Internet, but I'd have to take over doing what Amber Energy are doing if I lost access to the cloud.
But that's residential scale: at grid scale these things wouldn't be online in the same way anyway.
This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.
Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.
Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.
I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.
Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.
Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.
You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.
Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.
Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.
Are there any renewable energy companies manufacturing in the US? Seems like all are downstream of that, just providing installation and management. Actual energy security should include some meaningful domestic production.
T1 Energy in Texas is producing solar panels and systems including batteries at gigawatt(about 3 currently, but they're expanding) scales.
Illuminate USA in Ohio claims to be going even bigger than T1. Over 5 GW/year (10 million panels). But they just seem to manufacture panels and not batteries.
Some others include: Tesla, Qcells, Mission Solar, First Solar, Ambri, Enphase, Ørsted, TotalEnergies, and Generac.
Not all are fully vertically integrated and many still rely on global supply chains...
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
I’m not convinced the changing demographics are going to change much in the way of electoral outcomes. It could just as easily be that conservatism is just a function of age, and GenX-ers will be voting more or less the same as the boomers did.
That’s still important. GenX is smaller than the boomers or millennials.
If millennials and young men continue supporting maga and Trump’s party as they did last election, it won’t help much if Boomers expire.
Boomers also surprisingly voted slightly less for Trump than previous elections, his coalition in 24 expanded a bit to Hispanics and young men etc. he won due to inflation and covid imo, and probably due to sexism and only 107 days for Kamala to campaign (thanks Biden).
He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?
I like to cope optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and this is all his Golden Path to force humanity to grow wiser after his demise.
This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.
There is a massive opportunity for the US in the next 5-10 years to take advantage of a Slow Adopter advantage by only now truly taking advantage of the technological and cost advances made in the past 5-10 years.
Now that the public has heard the term “Trillions” whether it relates to defense spending or company valuations, that term is now somewhat more meaningless for grand scale ideas. Couple that with rising energy costs and you have a potential public appetite for a massive push for renewable and storage of all kinds.
The biggest difference now is that the tech and scale are here now. The prices are dropping like a rock for grid storage, thanks to China. Sodium-ion battery production is being ramped up.
I honestly think renewables will grow exponentially from now all fosil fuel is dead.
> thanks to China
We just have to be careful there. My fellow Europeans here will remember what resulted out of depending on an adversary for energy, in our case Russian NG. We don't want another energy crisis as the result of geopolitical tensions.
We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
> We shouldn't import foreign DRM, our critical infrastructure should not utilize foreign-hosted or proprietary IoT, and we should invest in local manufacturing utilizing automation.
How have you still not learned? By god Europe's in an awful place if you still don't get it.
You first import them en masse. You reverse engineer, learn how to do everything. Then you slowly invest in local manufacturing. China has shown you the way.
Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.
> solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance
Most countries have days to, at most, months of imports of oil in reserve. In contrast, a panel embargo wouldn’t have disastrous effects for years. But reliance it is the same. If you’re dependent on Chinese panels, China can cap your energy growth at whim. The degradation will be slow thereafter, but present nevertheless.
Using foreign panels for anything other than bootstrapping domestic or allied production would be the EU repeating its follies first with Russia and then with American LNG.
Stopping new panels in some hypothetical scenario is very different than stopping fossil fuel delivery when ch can stop ongoing energy production - it not even in the same timescale of problem
What are the alternatives for Europe? Continue to import oil and gas? Have some of your most important economic inputs price and supply controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs alive?
Nuclear? Good luck building it on time and on budget. Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from? I’m not necessarily against nuclear I just don’t think there’s much you can do in five or ten years to move the needle with Nuclear.
Wind? Actually a good option as it has a strong domestic supply chain.
Solar? Buy China’s cheap panels as long as they are selling. If they stop selling figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not some big mystery how panels get made, China just had the foresight to invest in the scale required to drive prices down.
Coal? I mean at least it’s local. But solar + batteries are either beating it now or will be in the next few years if the same trends that have held for the last 30 years continue for the next 2-5. So you’d be investing in a more expensive, dirtier technology for what end?
There is no world where you get to not make a decision and the risk just disappears. I think renewables have the clear advantage here and have very manageable risks.
Not the panel itself, but the firmware of the solar panel charge controller and inverter that's connected to the Internet because there's an app to monitor the system. I wouldn't bet that there aren't remote kill switches deep inside that firmware.
The panels and controllers are mostly interchangeable are they not?
They've found some of those in the wild. They weren't that deep.
Source?
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-...
"However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said. Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said."
It would not suprise me if not only Chinese manufacurers did this. Cellular modems are cheap and and the capability to cause blackout is very usefull.
It can stop working properly if the chinese panel is encryption locked to a chinese cloud which is the case with many residential installations.
Source?
My Chinese built inverter functions just fine without Internet, but I'd have to take over doing what Amber Energy are doing if I lost access to the cloud.
But that's residential scale: at grid scale these things wouldn't be online in the same way anyway.
it would be pretty straightforward to match up panels from any source to controllers free m local national sources
This is just foolishness in the modern world. A realistic trade policy would accept China getting AMSL nano-scale chip production machines in exchange for American manufacturers getting Chinese monocrystalline-ingot production machines.
Given the hysteria involved in Great Power warmongering circles, much of it designed to increase military-industrial outlays, this is highly unlikely at present, especially in the USA where fossil fuel demand destruction is something the investors in the fracking boom and the oilfield and refinery operators don’t want to see, just look at Exxon and Chevron profits over the past month. I doubt the affiliated investor-owned utilities would be thrilled about an explosion in US rooftop solar installations either, as that cuts directly into their revenue stream.
Now, if you want to build monocrystalline Si PV at scale from scratch to catch up to China, that’s going to take a lot of investment over a decade, and given the historical and present reluctance of the US government to fund such R & D at scale (tiny DOE budgets), it’s all going to be private, and private rentier-finance capital is not going to fund a major competitor to fossil fuels in the USA - margins are tighter, you replace a commodity stream with a one-time purchase of equipment with a minimum 20-yr lifespan, and unless you tightly control the equipment and the electrical generation, there go your rents, I mean profits.
All Europe has to do is let young people become billionaires with limited liability and an unencumbered team selection.
I know it sounds like satire, but there is a good reason tech exploded in the US 30 years ago while Europe is still making cars like it's the 1960's.
And how incredibly beneficial that has been to society at large, oh boy. Definitely something we need more of!
Seems to be an energy security trade, when oil goes up and geopolitics heats dependence gets priced again quickly
I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.
Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.
Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.
Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.
Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.
Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.
There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.
AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.
Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.
You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.
Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.
Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.
That used to be true, but things have really settled down. Notice the lack of rushing to start more fracking or refining projects during this crisis.
Typical commodity cycle...most commodities work like this
Are there any renewable energy companies manufacturing in the US? Seems like all are downstream of that, just providing installation and management. Actual energy security should include some meaningful domestic production.
Panasonic has a big US battery plant.
T1 Energy in Texas is producing solar panels and systems including batteries at gigawatt(about 3 currently, but they're expanding) scales.
Illuminate USA in Ohio claims to be going even bigger than T1. Over 5 GW/year (10 million panels). But they just seem to manufacture panels and not batteries.
Some others include: Tesla, Qcells, Mission Solar, First Solar, Ambri, Enphase, Ørsted, TotalEnergies, and Generac.
Not all are fully vertically integrated and many still rely on global supply chains...
not at a meaningful scale, and the environment for this under the current administration is increasingly hostile so it won't be for years
Fossil fuels are also funding terrorism around the world. Getting rid of it is good for peace too
It is remarkable the way fossil fuels often seem to be found in violent, barbarous places like Iran, Venezuela, and Texas.
Donald Trump: "Drill, baby, drill!"
American oil companies: "It doesn't pay, oil prices are too low to make drilling worth while."
Donald Trump: "War, baby, war!" (Oil prices go up)
The rest of the world: "Renewables!"
Five or ten years from now, when renewables have largely replaced oil, gas and coal in most of the world, the US will be the only major country still using fossil fuels. And the rest of the world will be better off; the US, not so much.
I wish I shared your optimism, but for fossil fuels to become irrelevant in ten years we’d need to ban the sale of ICE cars and fossil heating today. Not to mention industrial uses of fossil fuels.
Did horses need to be banned for them to become irrelevant? The next car I buy voluntarily won't be ICE.
Heating is slower to change, but new homes and buildings could come with solar walls and ceilings.
It’s no coincidence that everything from energy sources to civil rights to military strategy to trade policy struggle to evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period.
> evolve from the same era the US became a super power, 1945-1955. Its downfall is its nostalgia for that period
Four out of our last five Presidents were born within 4 years of each other [1]. Three (Bush Jr., Clinton and Trump) were born in 1946.
Good news: 2024 was probably the last election where Boomers’ vote share was above 25%. In 2028, a significant number of states, including California and Texas, will have fewer than 20% of votes cast by Boomers. (194 EVs in 2028 and, using 2020 Census numbers, a further 243 EVs in ‘32.)
[1] https://www.loriferber.com/amp/research/presidential-facts-s...
I’m not convinced the changing demographics are going to change much in the way of electoral outcomes. It could just as easily be that conservatism is just a function of age, and GenX-ers will be voting more or less the same as the boomers did.
I’d love to be proven wrong on this.
That’s still important. GenX is smaller than the boomers or millennials.
If millennials and young men continue supporting maga and Trump’s party as they did last election, it won’t help much if Boomers expire.
Boomers also surprisingly voted slightly less for Trump than previous elections, his coalition in 24 expanded a bit to Hispanics and young men etc. he won due to inflation and covid imo, and probably due to sexism and only 107 days for Kamala to campaign (thanks Biden).
Fossil fuels hopefully aren't going anywhere.
We should absolutely stop burning them, though.
For instance, modern medicine requires petroleum and there's no real alternatives at this time.
This is exactly what I came to post. It's like Trump was designed in a lab to destroy the US :-(
He was a hand grenade of identity and economic grievance thrown into the glassware shop of the federal government. He slashed, burned, grifted, and shot a missile into an elementary school. The worst president in history?
I like to cope optimistically that Trump is actually the God Emperor Leto II from Dune, the omniscient and visually hideous tyrant-messiah who is engineering the circumstances to “teach humanity a lesson they will remember in their bones”, and this is all his Golden Path to force humanity to grow wiser after his demise.
This is actually happening in a sense; because of Donald Trump, the entire world knows what it's like to live with an abusive narcissistic parent / partner now. Whether we get wise is yet to be seen.
The North Sea has given us free fish, trade with all corners of the world and now it's one giant windmill farm.
…did the fish run away?
maybe the all died of windmill cancer