I'm not sure I buy the premise that the country that makes the capital investment necessary to generate solar at scale will win the bulk of the economic benefit of the energy they produce. That economic benefit will mostly flow to the purchasers of the solar panels (i.e. the developing world).
But don’t those $s feed back to the country that produces them? So ROI
As someone who invested in Chinese solar companies during the Obama era, sold my stock during the bubble, and has checked on it periodically ever since, I can tell you: Chinese solar companies take on massive debt, make very little profit, and get bailed out by the Chinese govt, but don't profit.
Chinese solar is winning the market *because* they don't need to profit - the Chinese government backstops them with loans because the policy priority (energy independence, relationships in the developing world, market development, decarbonization, and lower pollution) outweigh the financial losses.
But let's not mistake China's willingness to do what we should have done for the sake of the world (invest hundreds of billions in producing the solar cells needed to save the world from global warming) for some profit center. It is nothing of the sort. China is hedging its bets, not profiting.
Thank you. This is a lot of detail I didn’t know. I’ll have to research more.
Here's a recent article in Reuters that explains the current state of affairs on Chinese solar: www.reuters.com/sustainabili...