“The People’s Republic of China is waging a brutal campaign of repression against the Uyghur people and other minorities with mass incarceration, torture and forced labor,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said during a news conference Wednesday before the vote. “With these bills, the House is combating this horrific situation and shining a light on Beijing’s abuse.”
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Nevermind the US slave labor codified in our constitution, concentration camps for brown people, including babies and children, and (illegal) assassination of a foreign diplomat.
Reminder that over 75% of the raw material for solar panels comes from China, and 2/3 of that comes directly from XinJiang. Western manufacturers have struggled to build capacity because they can't make it profitably, reliably in the US or Europe (and there's zero chance they're gonna get better at it in the US, trust me).
Wow that's crazy, which materials are those? Where can we read more?
How come there's zero chance the us or Europe will get better at producing them reliably? Cheap makes sense, but what are the constraints with reliability?
Polysilicon. It's very capital intensive for what's essentially a commodity like Iron ore, it's very electricity intense (i.e. you need a good, stable power grid), takes nasty inputs, and it's very sensitive to vibration (i.e. limits your choice of factory locations, largely to places people do not want to live either). The "Siemens" process is the most common. The Fluid Bed tech they mention in the article has been tried in the US and utterly failed - one thing I don't see mentioned in the article is that the FBR requires less power for heat, but the monosilane gas they use is very flammable - it will combust when exposed to air without a spark 🔥
The reliably part is less about the technology and more about the boom/bust nature of basic level commodities like that, which makes it very hard for Capital to justify ponying up so much money that it takes to run the factory. For these kind of basic materials, it takes a war or some other massive government investment to get the "activation energy" (for my chem nerds) to build the necessary infrastructure and basic research.
10 years ago, when Obama first made a big solar push, the US tried to expand its capacity. Then when the price dumped (classic overproduction, but it was blamed on CHYNA), the US firms threw a hissy fit and pretty much tried to force the customers to give them money. Now going forward they've basically thrown in the towel to those dastardly reds. Wacker, a German company, does have a relatively new facility in Tennessee, but that relies on cheap TVA power which is pretty much tapped out.