这是布隆伯格观点今日栏目，汇聚了诸多独家见解与评论。我们发现，太阳能源行业在近年来经历了惊人的转型，从一个边缘地带跃升至蓬勃发展的热点领域。David Fickling 在一篇免费可读的深入报道中提及，“仅仅15年间，从相对不被关注到突然成为了业界翘楚”，太阳能源已发生巨变。
Fickling 指出，全球新增太阳模块装机容量在2024年三日内就能与2005年末全球累计总规模相匹敌。这其中的核心推动力来自于一个五字母词——中国。尽管北京此前并非太阳能领域的先行者，在2010年前，密歇根州萨吉诺县的某小镇一度以生产多晶硅闻名世界，这是制造太阳电池所需的主要原材料。
为揭开美国失去先发优势之谜以及中美太阳能产业崛起与竞争的复杂历程，David Fickling 走访了两座相距约7500英里（约12,000公里）的不同规模太阳能工厂，一座位于五大湖地区，另一座则坐落在中国四川省。探访起点是Hemlock Semiconductor公司，这是美国历史上在偏远密歇根州颇具影响力且历史悠久的多晶硅制造商。
Fickling 记录了参观经历，并附上照片。尽管访问被拒，他在森林中守候时所拍下的场景却透露出敬业精神与记者风范。1954年，一些科学家发明了为计算机处理器供电的方法，而Hemlock公司在该片孤寂农场的土地上于1961年成立。
尽管擅长生产用于电子设备的芯片级多晶硅，该工厂在太阳用多晶硅开发初期未能满足需求增长。Fickling 指出，在20世纪末期前，全球所有集成电路和太阳能板所需的原材料几乎全部在美国、欧洲与日本生产。这一寡头垄断结构对太阳能制造商造成了高昂成本。
“然而，中国竞争对手看到了利用更低生产成本击败美国同行的机会，并引发了一场贸易战。” Fickling 如是写道。快进到现在，美国在太阳能历史中的角色仅为配角：今天全球最大的太阳能源生产商Tongwei公司坐拥遍布全中国的生产基地，在能源资源丰富的地区提供廉价电力。
位于乐山的中国工厂年产量约达12万吨，而Tongwei公司的总产能预计为48万吨。这一数字足以让墨西哥使用一年、或相当于印度尼西亚和英伦三岛合并后的用电量。“他们不能再与中国人竞争了。”在乐山厂战略发展部负责人午餐时接受Fickling采访后，对方如是说。
面对现实，美国太阳能行业的生存状况极为艰难。“要拥有完整的光伏产业供应链——从多晶硅、锭块生产、片材切割到电池制造以及最后的组件组装——都显得难以为继。” Fickling认为，“连续不断的关税并未对形成繁荣产业起到多少作用”，反而“在气候危机加剧时，增加了清洁能源成本”。美国官员需要放下保护主义立场，并接受中国太阳能板行业的主导地位。
作为额外阅读资源，Fickling探讨了钴和锂对于电池行业的重要性。价格下滑并不一定确保其安全性，这是一片复杂领域值得深入研究的问题之一。而关于自动化与人工智能在金融领域的挑战话题，则有另一篇文章进行详细分析。
当谈及气候危机对美国境内各地区的威胁，Fickling使用了一个令人警醒的案例——西方北卡罗来纳州发生的洪水灾难。在飓风赫尔内登陆前后的暴雨导致了前所未有的破坏和人员伤亡、道路毁坏等现象。即使是那些认为自己对于全球变暖相对安全的地方也未能幸免。
最后，Bloomberg观点指出美国总统拜登提出的世界范围内减少铅污染倡议值得全球关注与讨论。美国首都在财富和经济权力方面并未像其他一些国家那样出现集中趋势，“这在某种程度上是一个积极的迹象”，Fickling写道。
美国是否会在世界大战中扮演帝国角色？Kari Lake在亚利桑那州参议员竞选中失利的消息传来，甚至Ryan Reynolds对英国官僚体系进行了讽刺。此外，在内塔尼亚胡决定后，以色列未来可能走向更多战争的道路成为关注焦点。
最后，一种关联到患者死亡的药物被撤下货架，并讨论了加州私人监狱禁令、LVMH退出Off-White品牌、Beyoncé加入Levi’s“洗衣店”广告系列及电影《Megalopolis》在影院上映等新闻事件。还提到了一个有趣的事实——或许整个时间，人们都低估了纽约市的地位。
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新闻来源：www.bloomberg.com
原文地址：How the US Lost Solar Energy Dominance to China
新闻日期：2024-09-30
原文摘要：
This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a valuable commodity of Bloomberg Opinion’s opinions. .Not that we needed any more analogies, but solar power is, in many ways, the baby hippo/midwest princess of the energy world. Seemingly overnight — well, 15 years, give or take — the power source went from “a backwater to a boom industry,” David Fickling in a new free-to-read feature. In 2024 alone, he says “the capacity of new modules installed globally every three days is roughly equivalent to what existed in the entire world at the end of 2005.” At the center of that domination is a five-letter word: China.Beijing hasn’t always gone hard on solar panels, though: As recently as 2010, a random town in Saginaw County, Michigan was the world’s biggest producer of polysilicon, the main ingredient needed for solar. To find out why — and how — the US lost its initial foothold in the industry, David Fickling about 7,500 miles, or 12,000 kilometers to two vastly different solar cell plants, one in the Great Lakes region and the other in China’s Sichuan province.First up: Hemlock Semiconductor, low-profile, albeit historically significant polysilicon producer in remote Michigan. And I mean remote. To anyone who thinks journalism is a , here’s a photo David took while staking out in the woods — ever the dedicated columnist! — after the company turned down his requests to visit the facility:In 1954, some scientists figured out to power computer processors, and by 1961, Hemlock was born on this plot of isolated farmland. Although the plant excelled at making chip-grade polysilicon, which David says is in almost every electronic device on the planet, it took nearly 40 years for solar polysilicon — made from scraps rejected by chipmakers — to become a valuable commodity in its own right.“Hemlock initially surfed this wave,” David writes, but wasn’t able to keep up with demand. “Until the mid-2000s, the raw material for all the chips and solar panels on the planet was in the US, Europe and Japan,” David explains. That oligopoly was extremely costly for solar panel manufacturers, and “Chinese rivals spied an opportunity to sell at half the costs of incumbents, sparking a trade war with the US.” Fast-forward to now, and America is merely a footnote in solar history:China’s Tongwei, the world’s biggest solar power player today, has outposts throughout the country in energy-rich regions where power is cheap. The Sichuan-based site in Leshan, where David visited, “can produce about 120,000 tons, and Tongwei as a whole will have a capacity of 480,000 tons this year,” an astonishing figure: “480,000 tons is enough to generate sufficient solar electricity to power Mexico for a year — or Indonesia, or the UK and Ireland put together.”David spoke to the site’s strategic development director over a lunch of chicken-feet skewers. “For Tongwei, everything is about the market,” the executive said. “I don’t think there will be a renaissance for the US, Europe and Japan … They cannot compete with the Chinese players any more.”David mostly agrees. “The US solar industry that’s left is moribund at best,” he writes. “To have a functioning PV sector you need every piece of the supply chain — from polysilicon, ingot production and wafer slicing to cell manufacturing and finally module assembly. There’s precious little sign that’s going to emerge on a sufficient scale in the US,” he writes, and levies won’t help: “Successive waves of tariffs have done little more than create a Potemkin solar industry, while putting a tax on clean power as the climate crisis festers.” As painful as it may be to admit defeat, US officials need to drop their protectionist act and make peace with China’s solar panel supremacy. Read .Bonus Energy Reading: Cobalt and lithium are essential to the . A slump in prices doesn’t guarantee their security. — Javier BlasSpeaking of everything revolving around the market, here’s a from the of HBO’s Industry:And here’s , for good measure:A machine could do your job! Our partners can only be allayed by more automation!! Heavy sobbing!!! This is the stuff of TV dreams. It’s also the subject of Allison Schrager’s on financial planning:Sure, likening or to a mass-produced tote bag might seem unfair. But an AI reckoning for their real-life Wall Street equivalents is coming, and those who are willing to pony up more money for a personalized human touch are gonna trust people like over any day of the week.Mark Gongloff asked me — well, really — to draw areas vulnerable to climate change on a map of the US. Here’s mine. Forewarning: It’s pretty ugly. And by no means a reflection of the truly wonderful data visualization capabilities we have at our disposal at Bloomberg News:Predictably, I circled all of the coasts and a handful of troublesome states — Arizona, California, Texas, Louisiana and Florida — for good measure. But clearly I didn’t go inland enough: That yellow star you see near the Appalachians — which I added after my initial doodle — is western North Carolina, a temperate, mountainous region that Mark says is the new poster-child for disaster preparedness.“Some places there received more than of rain before and during [Hurricane Helene], causing biblical flooding that has taken 40 lives, and roads and from their pilings to ,” he writes. “It’s that no matter how insulated people might feel from the global heating humanity has caused by burning fossil fuels and otherwise generating planet-warming gases, there are no real safe havens.”The widespread wreckage — 200-plus miles of and — came as a major shock to even the most climate-aware. “If you had asked me a week ago, I would probably have recommended Asheville, North Carolina, as an ideal spot to ride out the climate emergency. It’s a lovely, vibrant city far from the ocean, with plenty of fresh water and not so vulnerable to heat. I wasn’t alone; Asheville often of possible climate havens. All of us were tragically wrong,” Mark admits.Bonus Disaster Reading:Nobody’s talking about how President Biden has a worldwide initiative to , but we should be! Globally, lead poisoning is almost seven times more prevalent than it was in Flint, Michigan. Bangladesh has . Pakistan sells with lead. Turkey with lead. Afghanistan cooks with coated in lead. Matthew Yglesias says Biden’s to curb all that might end up being one of his “greatest legacies,” but it likely won’t be felt for decades.Welp, looks like we don’t need to worry about Washington, DC “becoming * the* imperial city of the United States” — a concern apparently share! — anytime soon. Justin Fox “the area isn’t all that rich, for one thing. And it has been losing ground to other regions in recent years,” contrary to all those you hear about. “Unlike the UK, or France, or Japan, the US is not experiencing an ever-growing concentration of wealth and economic power in and around its capital,” he writes. I suppose that’s something to cheer!A Ukraine might do more harm than good. — Bloomberg’s editorial boardKari Lake has and is trailing badly in Arizona’s Senate race. — Erika D. SmithEven Ryan Reynolds Britain's bureaucratic blob. — Matthew BrookerAfter , Netanyahu may choose more war. — Marc ChampionA medicine linked to patient deaths has been from shelves. — Lisa JarvisDropping is disenfranchisement in disguise. — Patricia LopezXi Jinping’s signals a technocratic shift within China’s government. — Shuli RenA blank check started World War I. The US can’t with Israel. — Andreas KluthCan Labour without angering its voters? — Martin IvensCalifornia banned private .LVMH Virgil Abloh’s Off-White.Beyoncé Levi’s “Launderette” ad.Megalopolis is playing in theaters.Have we gotten this whole time?Timothée Chalamet got .What happened to NYC’s ?Notes: Please send and feedback to Jessica Karl at . and follow us on , , , and .
