Not quite the same, a solar panel installed doesn’t disappear if China changes their stance.

JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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dv_dt 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

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torpfactory 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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pyrale 16 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Also where exactly are you getting that Uranium from?

Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled). Since it is about 1% of the energy cost, that’s pretty inexpensive.

Also, uranium comes from suppliers on 4 different continents, there is little chance that it becomes unavailable overnight.

	▲	jurgenburgen 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Uranium can be stockpiled relatively easily (france had 4-5 years of uranium stockpiled). What’s stopping us from stockpiling solar panels?
	▲	Paradigm2020 13 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Where do you get the uranium processed so you can use it your reactors...

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cycomanic 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Importantly, it used to be Germany which had all the expertise, until the CDU government destroyed much of the German solar industry over night. It's funny how everyone always talks about Germany stopping Nuclear energy but nobody ever talks about the fact that subsequent German governments destroyed the renewables industry twice (and they are talking about it again), largely due to lobbying from the coal, Nuclear and car industries. Definitely an interesting what if

	▲	leonidasrup 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Could you please send which lobbies worked on destroying renewables industry twice? (You probably mean destroying solar industry, wind industry is up and running). I could only find that EU manufacturers of solar panels wanted tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels and EU builders and operators of solar power plants didn't want tariffs on imported Chinese solar panels. https://www.politico.eu/article/europes-solar-industry-at-wa...

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froggy 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are solar panel manufacturers outside of China that have no dependence on Chinese inputs such as polysilicon, wafers, and ingots. Two that come to mind are First Solar (US) and Toyo Solar (Japan). I’m sure there are others. Europe can buy from them while scaling local manufacturing.

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api 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The EU has the talent to ramp local production of panels and batteries in years, which as the parent said is how long a panel or battery embargo would take to really cause a crisis.

I mean the EU has ASML, the Large Hadron Collider, and ITER, among other things. There is no engineering talent problem.

If they couldn’t do it it’s a political problem.

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dgellow 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m more concerned that we do not have the supply chain. Like, sure, we have people who can build solar panels, but are the components local? I wouldn’t expect so, we would very likely import from china. Developing effective supply chains takes decades, it’s not really something you can do right away with the level of precision required by modern technology

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api 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Look at how fast various nations ramped up advanced (for the time) military production before and during WWII, or the Manhattan Project, or the Apollo program, or China's rapid rise.

Engineers who know how to build factories, batteries, and solar panels could sit down and create a "war plan" to build out and scale infrastructure quickly if you asked them to do it and then got out of the way.

The EU has plenty of talent with the know-how to do this. If it couldn't be done even in a crisis situation, that's a political problem.

	▲	cybercatgurrl 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		it’s my understanding that inefficient bureaucracy is the biggest stumbling block for rapid infrastructure or technological growth. engineers can get it done but the bottle neck will likely be to do with how fast government bodies can move
	▲	cybercatgurrl 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		it’s my understanding that inefficient bureaucracy has always been significant stumbling block for infrastructure

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convolvatron 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

panels themselves are highly simplified chip-like production. silicon crystals and some dopants. anyone can make extruded aluminum. anyone can build power electronics, make copper or aluminum wire.

the only interesting parts here from a supply chain perspective are power transistors. europeans have been known to design these, but idk how easy it would be to start producing them locally. they have macroscopic feature sizes though.

it would take several years of iteration to get a functioning pipeline that ran at volume, but none of this is hugely complicated. certainly not decades.

the real problem is financialization. you have to float that plant with the understanding that its not going to be competitive.

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mcbishop 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But there is some valid concern around internet-connected PV / battery power electronics getting bricked remotely.

	▲	adrian_b 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Power electronics shall never be connected to the "Internet". Any such installations of solar panels, batteries and the like must be interconnected only in a private network without Internet access. For remote monitoring and control a proxy mini-PC must be used, to which one should use an authenticated and encrypted connection. For any competent person, this is trivial to do today, to ensure that even if some electronic device includes a backdoor for its vendor that backdoor cannot be accessed. If there exists any kind of wireless connection provided by the vendor for a device, it must be disabled, e.g. by removing any internal or external antennas. Unlike wired connections that can be filtered externally, wireless connections cannot be secured.

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gostsamo 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It can stop working properly if the chinese panel is encryption locked to a chinese cloud which is the case with many residential installations.

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cybercatgurrl 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

encryption isn’t gonna do shit to stop you from directly connecting to the anode and cathode on a panel. it would be incredibly trivial to bypass

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XorNot 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	gostsamo 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		and what if they can use your inverter to destabilize not only your netwrok, but the local grit as well? and how far it can go if sychrnoized with malicious intend?

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bluGill 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Panels can be opened and are simple enough for a tech to bypass the encryption.

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riskd 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Source?

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fragmede 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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cybercatgurrl 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

this is where the real risk is. nobody can stop you from directly tapping the panel’s power but an inverter can potentially be bricked if it has internet. this is more an issue with residential than industrial. i would hope that all industrial panels are air-gapped specifically to pre-empt this scenario

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interstice 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The panels and controllers are mostly interchangeable are they not?

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firebot 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They've found some of those in the wild. They weren't that deep.

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JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Source?

	▲	leonidasrup 16 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.