You don't have to worry about Chinese solar panels coming to Canada.
Pipelines, energy and natural resources
- Thread starter QV
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You don't have to worry about Chinese solar panels coming to Canada.
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is it subject to litigation in China?
was there a lot of litigation holdup with Ontarios recent recommitment to nuclear
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Sure. Those are countries with plenty of self-inflicted problems. All of the ideas of the west have already been dumped into their laps. I don't expect them to reap any higher fraction of benefit from the electrification revolution than they did from liberal institutions or the agrarian revolution. Africa always wins.
In my lifetime and before it, pretty much everyone promising some kind of extraordinary change in 5 or 10 years has been wrong. Electrification will increase. It will be driven by cost, despite short bursts of political effort. It will take a long time. Today's market leaders will not likely maintain position indefinitely. No-one is sitting on tech or resources that aren't available elsewhere or substitutable.
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The point is that China's cost advantages would decrease if not be eliminated if we adopted their standards or held them to ours.
Who is "we"? Cause "we" already tariff the hell out of them. What is relevant in this discussion isn't what happens in Canada. It's the billions of people who don't yet have AC and family cars.
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yes but within China they are competing within themselves? nuclear vs solar vs .....
Not quite. Nuclear for China is competing first with imported LNG and oil. And next with coal. The Chinese understand that you don't need baseload at 100%. They use renewables to provide most of the cheap electricity. And then build coal, nuclear and gas plants (in that order) as needed. There's also the curious phenomenon of building coal plants as seasonal reserve. It's why their actual coal power utilization rates are down. They aren't running all the time.
We need to worry about Chinese solar because:
1) Risk of it displacing global LNG demand (growth or absolute).
2) Their $/W advantage can be weaponized to win in manufacturing, AI, etc.
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Let's assume that the whole world goes off fossil fuels and that there is zero commercial value in any carbon fuel source.
What is the cost of fuel in the ground? If I park a factory on top of a zero cost fuel source and have zero transportation costs what does that do to my cost of production?
If you have cheap fuel available you will use it.
If you don't you will find the next cheapest solution and adapt your economy accordingly.
The problem is that not all locations have ready fuel supplies to support the economies they wish and so they sought to level up the playing field by ensuring that everyone was equally handi-capped.
The issue started in Europe with Germany and France chasing Britain's industrial revolution which was powered by native coal and iron deposits. Germany and France found themselves fighting over Belgian coal mines. They decided to solve their problems by first signing a Coal and Steel treaty and then, concurrently, putting their faith in the new kid on the block, the atom, and establishing Euratom.
Britain played along but then the North Sea happened making gas more attractive and nuclear accidents took the bloom off the atomic rose. Plan B involved sun and wind at exorbitant costs and doing a deal with the devil to access cheap Russian gas necessary to back up those fitful renewables.
....
If everybody went off fossil fuels, places like Alberta that are sitting on them would still use them, even if it meant having to invest some of the transportation savings on scrubbers and carbon capture.
And its neighbours would be trying to figure out if they could tap into the supply cheaply.
What is the cost of fuel in the ground? If I park a factory on top of a zero cost fuel source and have zero transportation costs what does that do to my cost of production?
If you have cheap fuel available you will use it.
If you don't you will find the next cheapest solution and adapt your economy accordingly.
The problem is that not all locations have ready fuel supplies to support the economies they wish and so they sought to level up the playing field by ensuring that everyone was equally handi-capped.
The issue started in Europe with Germany and France chasing Britain's industrial revolution which was powered by native coal and iron deposits. Germany and France found themselves fighting over Belgian coal mines. They decided to solve their problems by first signing a Coal and Steel treaty and then, concurrently, putting their faith in the new kid on the block, the atom, and establishing Euratom.
Britain played along but then the North Sea happened making gas more attractive and nuclear accidents took the bloom off the atomic rose. Plan B involved sun and wind at exorbitant costs and doing a deal with the devil to access cheap Russian gas necessary to back up those fitful renewables.
....
If everybody went off fossil fuels, places like Alberta that are sitting on them would still use them, even if it meant having to invest some of the transportation savings on scrubbers and carbon capture.
And its neighbours would be trying to figure out if they could tap into the supply cheaply.
What's the point of this hypothetical? This is obviously something that can't happen. As long as somebody is willing to use a thing, it has economic value to said somebody. Relative economic value can change. If you have cheap oil coming out of the ground, it will make sense to use it. Most of the world doesn't have that though. Heck, most of Canada doesn't have that.
Let's consider an alternative hypothetical that might be plausible over the next 10-15 years. You go to the dealership and the BEV and ICEV are priced exactly the same out the door. What do you think the majority of people would buy?
And for governments it gets substantially more complex. Every dollar (or Euro) used to import fuel is one less to buy something else needed for industry. Or other consumption.
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In Ontario or Alberta?
Where is the fuel cheapest? What is the maintenance cost? What is performance like in the requisite environments?
The point of the hypothetical was to drive home the impact of policy on decision making and the limits of policy. Policy didn't drive the industrial revolution, economics did. Policy tried to constrain the revolution. I think it is demonstrably failing. What was an economic revolution is at risk of becoming a political revolution in many places.
I agree. What's interesting is that people understand this for the original industrial revolution but fail to understand it for the current revolution.
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Whether we already "tariff the hell out of them" is irrelevant, particularly if it's being done for other purposes - in response to their trade protectionism, in response to demands to indulge in our own trade protectionism, for pure politics.
If another country is willing to pollute itself and we are not, costs of its industries are likely to be lower (manifested as externalities). Canada could choose to calculate and levy tariffs to offset that kind (ignoring environmental damage) of cost advantage.
Of course the "billions of people" are relevant. But the way out is through - we get to the more electrified future by depending upon the highly fossil-fueled present. The people who predicted five or ten years ago that fossil fuels would be obsolete by now were all wrong, as were the people who predicted mass starvation and flooding and all the other horsemen of the climate apocalypse. To the extent their predictions were heeded, a lot of damage was done by foregoing initiation of projects that would by now be producing desirable results and by misallocating capital to things that aren't providing much benefit. Over-optimistic projections are equally risky.
It wasn't all clean economics. You forget the corruption then too.
General Motors streetcar conspiracy - Wikipedia
Remember when doctors were paid to tell people that cigarettes were not harmful.
In any event. Like I keep saying, our domestic politics is largely irrelevant. Nobody in Africa or Pakistan is basing their decision on solar PV or EVs based on what Carney or Poilievre do. They do it based on economics.
Heck, even the Saudis are getting in on the game. Using their solar advantage to build cheap data centres. They'll happily use cheap Chinese solar. Despite all that cheap oil. Funny what happens when ideology goes out the window and there's money to be made. They can turn mostly useless desert to service dollars with data centres, while still exporting oil.
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China is dealing with reliability issues. They need more overcapacity than we do just to handle setbacks we don't experience much for simple reasons like better build quality and management. They also need overcapacity to back up renewables. So they're still building a lot of coal thermal plants; they're building pretty much everything they can.
Given the number of countries using Chinese solar, this would be quite entertaining.
Full on North Korea Juche I guess. It's an interesting economic philosophy. Not sure one I'd want to live through. But interesting.
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You're continently glossing over the latitudes of those countries compared to one of our most southern cities, Toronto. Solar makes a heck of a lot more sense at the equator or even subtropical zones than it does in Toronto which averages about 3 hours of sunlight in the winter months.
They use what they have and we're forcing solutions into geography that doesn't work while locking abundant, cheap, natural gas behind ideology.
I've never said we should be installing tons of solar over here. I've consistently said use what is cheapest. I've even said I would prefer Alberta's open market. It enables cheap power.
And again I've said there's a need to distinguish between our domestic discussion and global trends. On this issue, I generally don't care what happens at home. Just hoping our power prices don't get so uncompetitive that industry gets wiped out. But I do think we need to understand the global trends and the implications beyond just first order.
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I don't expect it to happen; climate religion is no more consistent than any other kind.
The point doesn't change. China has lower costs in part because it accepts (or the people are forced to accept) lower environmental standards. If we choose to allow them to pay those costs and to consume whatever they produce more cheaply than we could produce for ourselves, good for us.
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