Where it says “a while?” This has the distinctive ring of Kentucky windage to me, are there any actual studies on how long it would take to do this? What’s the shape of the curve? If it’s a while on a logarithmic curve that’s very different than if it’s linear or exponential.
The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.
Well, on the one hand, Chinese manufacturers (90% of the market) have announced expansions for 2022-2025 of 645 GWe annual production, over and above 2021's total annual manufacturing capacity of 220 GWe.
On the other hand, likely all of that will be needed to meet Xi's 2030 target for PV power generation in China. (12,000 GWe capacity, up from 800 now? Something like that.)
So near exponential but not much slack for others to use, probably.
I think they're doing a much better job of controlling costs on nuclear plant construction, so that wouldn't invalidate the claim about what you can do with 20 billion dollars.
The impression that I’ve gotten is that there isn’t a huge amount of slack panel production capacity sitting idle. If we’ve learned anything the last two years, hopefully it’s that supply chain problems can take a while to sort out.