Solar, wind, and market takeovers

Possibly the headline of this Reuters article should have been rephrased as, "Has China already kicked all of our asses, and is there anything we can do about it at this point?" because when you've managed to overcome Germany's substantial head start in solar in, like, three years, you are not kidding around.

This is a good backgrounder for an interesting conversation I had with my advisor today, about why China is taking over in solar (two thirds of solar cell production in the global market, according to this article) while not yet (or are they? see below) administering the same ass-kicking in wind. We discussed the possibility that it's a case of suitability of the domestic market as a lead market (solar isn't actually a very well-suited technology to Germany's climate, while wind is quite well-suited to the Danish domestic market). But this article suggests it's just different subsidy structures - both Germany and China subsidize solar power pretty heavily, but Germany doesn't discriminate on country of manufacturing, while China does. This raises the question of whether there's a similar subsidy structure difference with regard to wind, China, and Denmark; and if not, why not?/if so, why different outcomes? I don't know.

However, this article suggests in fact the story is going just the same way in wind, and there's no discrepancy to account for. One of the frustrating things about these industries is they're growing and changing so fast that one year's difference in data (say, on market share) can tell a completely different story. It's hard to keep up, and dangerous to predict.

In any case, supposedly the US is considering WTO trade dispute proceedings against China over this stuff, which will be an interesting line for it to walk, given that it's also been trying to initiate significant R&D cooperation on green energy technologies with China.

By the way, why is there this big counter-wind movement based on the supposed eyesore value of wind installations? I find wind installations tend to be quite beautiful.