(January 29, 2018 at 7:47 am)Khemikal Wrote: Sure, but greed being a reality, we might want to point it in a better direction, lol. Tilting at windmills, really. The only way we get a cleaner, greener future is if there's a boatload of money in it. While that may be a sad commentary on the nature of man and market, it is the reality.
The trick is to get customers informed. So that they realize that the cheapest panels are..well..cheap ass knock-offs. That's why step one for the bad actors was to subvert the industry groups that reliably tracked solar and turn them into their own marketing wings.
In the long run, shitty solar is still an upgrade, and if some country wants to sell us a cheap product and incur the damage that it's manufacture causes on their own backyards, so be it. It's at cross-purpose to why people buy solar (but not to why industry would go solar..they'll always go for the econo-panels). To my mind, this is just a failure of branding, and thus a -failure- of greed. The ad campaign is baked in. Don't buy those shitty panels, they're not what you think they are. Buy ours instead. They're more expensive, and it's worth it.
Yay, boatloads of money for errybody!
There is nothing to this tariff except for making solar completely uncompetitive in the USA. That's it. Unless you have a quazi-American company that can get around this kind of tariff, sorry, but this is simply going to cause solar not to be built in the USA. Which is a shame, because the USA has plenty of very good, competitive solar resources.
This isn't an attempt to keep 'cheap ass knock-offs' out of the country. It's not 'shitty solar'. Chinese panels are fine quality wise (perhaps made with lower environmental or social standards, but don't pretend the US federal government gives a crap about that). This is simply an attack on solar PV because it's beginning to outcompete conventional energy on an even playing field. The overwhelming response from conventional energy companies is to try to shut the industry down on other levels, to defend their market share.
Also, the only reason the cost of PV solar has decreased so drastically in the last 10 years is because China has so fervently entered the market and developed the technology. So no, this isn't a case of the Chinese making 'knock-off' solar panels - they basically are the industry.
