Doomberg: The media can’t seem to explain the collapse in China’s domestic solar installations.
We often quip that the best proof that something was predictable is having predicted it. While not totally accurate—dumb luck and broken clocks are still things—nailing a complex call in the face of cocksure counter-commentary is anything but unsatisfying. It also confirms that our mental model is still operative in the way that matters most: it remains useful for further predictions.
In August of 2025, we produced a bonus presentation for paying subscribers titled Cocktail Party Trivia: Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends and Family (available here). In it, we elaborated extensively on our current mental model in which a working understanding of electric grids became a tool for predicting when the forced introduction of intermittent renewables would cause things to break. Some 31 minutes in, we warned that China’s solar miracle was reaching the limits of feasibility, and that the breakneck pace of new construction would soon have to slow.
At the time, China was on pace to smash global records for new solar installations, and legacy media outlets were falling over themselves to heap praise on Beijing’s bold climate leadership. On social media, the Silicon Valley crowd was lamenting how the US was desperately falling behind its main competitor in the artificial intelligence race, hooked on “yesterday’s fuels” like natural gas. US President Donald Trump came under withering criticism and was pounded for his efforts to save the domestic coal industry. That China still relies on coal for the vast majority of its electricity was rarely mentioned.
Imagine our lack of surprise, then, when we opened our weekend edition of the Financial Times to find Adam Tooze’s latest lament, “Wasting China’s solar panel surplus is madness”…
Cocktail Party Trivia (35 minutes): Winning the Renewables Debate With Friends & Family
Here in CA … Solar makes NO economic SENSE whatsoever … unless you pair it with a $16,000.00 Tesla Powerwall + at least one $6,000.00 expansion unit = $22,000.00 (min.) + installation cost … Here in the SF Bay Area. Because you use MOST of your electricity at night, including recharging your EV. Your total solar and battery system is gonna cost $50-60,000.00 min. And your cheap ChiCom solar panels start degrading from day one.
And the Federal tax credits are gone.
Perhaps that’s why ChiCom Solar panels are piling up. Just as with EV’s … everyone who is a true believer has bought their EV … and these same well-heeled virtue signalers have bought their solar systems as well. The rest of us? We can count, so we aren’t adopting a solar $LOSS$ just to feeeeeel good about ourselves.
” Just as with EV’s … everyone who is a true believer has bought their EV … and these same well-heeled virtue signalers have bought their solar systems as well. The rest of us? We can count,”
Amen, Kenji. I’ve been trying to tell that to a friend who is a Tesla fanatic and invested in the company, but he won’t hear it.
Get the prices down to 20k or so and we’ll talk. 70 to 100k for a Tesla (in Canada) is ridiculous.
“Because you use MOST of your electricity at night, including recharging your EV.”
You might have seen my analysis of solar hot-water heaters in Arizona. Nobody has them. Because in the daytime, you are not home using hot water. So all that sun heats one (1) tank of water per day and after that it’s all electric heat, plus pumping costs, plus installation of all the solar doodads, plus maintenance.
“But Phantom, just use a larger tank!” Do you really want a huge f-ing 400 gallon tank of super hot water around your house? It’s HOT. Hot is -bad- in Phoenix. How much for the tank? How much to bury it? (You want 400 gallons of hot water sitting in your garage? Tanks rust. When they’re hot, they rust a -lot- faster.) How much for the insulation?
And thus, solar hot water does not pay off even in the hottest, sunniest city in the USA. It might, a little bit, for something like a car wash. But I haven’t seen a car wash with solar panels. Ever.
I did find it curious that Nancy Gutherie’s expensive home in a high end Tucson neighborhood… had no solar. Not even to heat her swimming pool. No water heating solar, no photovoltaic solar … nada. Nor did many, if any, of her neighbors. Yes, we were all treated to nonstop satellite imagery of the neighborhood.
This despite her multi-millionaire daughter being a true-believing, eco-leftist, planet champion.
Stupid chicomms, eh. Still burning carbon fuels … when they should be committing green suicide like the rest of us.
Well the simple truth is, the “global warming”, “climate change” fraud was designed to enrich one country and one country only……Communist China. That is why Liberal and Maoist Maurice Strong was one of the architects of the fraud with the Club of Rome and why he hid out in his digs in Beijing when he was implicated in the Iraq oil for food scam.
The Chinks always over-produce because it’s a command economy.
They have 80 million empty apartments – almost two for every Chink-loving Chinadian.
Gotta give them credit for producing.
The stupid Soviets couldn’t keep up with demand for galoshes.
“They have 80 million empty apartments – almost two for every Chink-loving Chinadian.”
And thousands of brand new EVs produced, parked and marked as ‘sold’.
Read and reflect on FT’s avoidance of economics:
“It’s a political economy problem. Incumbent baseload generators demand their pound of flesh. China’s own huge fleet of coal-fired power stations squeezes out demand for more solar and wind.
”
Mamdami and/ or Sanders freelancing for the Financial Times?
my fav images of massive solar panel arrays are the ones all smashed like this one that wuz floating above a dam or some such in lndia. bit of inclement weather and bada bing bada bang its all scrap.
https://stopthesethings.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/solar-panel-float.png
Personally, I can’t wait for the public hangings of the progs, shysters, hucksters, and flim-flam artists responsible for blanketing millions of acres of formerly productive farmland with these toxic glass panels. Also the corrupt reporters who propagandized on behalf of the CHICOMS.