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wraptilelast Saturday at 6:06 AM1 replyview on HN

China has been rolling back subsidies because they won solar panels. No other country is even remotely close to market strength as China here and obviously for Chinese it makes sense to reduce incentives but does that make sense for the US which has 1% of this market power?

> Between January and May, China added 198 GW of solar and 46 GW of wind, enough to generate as much electricity as Indonesia or Turkey [1]

1 - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/26/china-breaks-m...


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jimmydorryyesterday at 3:42 PM

China "won solar panels" because they subsidised the production to the point that their companies could sell panels cheaper than they cost to make, and then these companies were allowed to dump them below cost into the western markets to destroy all the local innovation. Germany and the US in particular just sat back and watched that happen.

However, market share doesn't really translate into the economics of large scale generation. The projects that are marginal (or negative) in the US and rest of the world for that matter, are costed using whatever the cheapest panels or materials available are. Whether they are local or not does not matter. You are conflating two unrelated things here (local manufacturing capability and power generation e.g. actually deploying renewables).

China meeting arbitrary targets is also beside the point. They are building a tonne of solar and wind, but they are also building more coal too. (Refer to my previous comment in how they along with many other G7 and developed nations are investing more in coal than they were in 2020).

GP made some specific claims which were demonstratably false. The points you raise here aren't particularly related to those.

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