Many governmens do this, allowing themselves to support experiments with the citizen's money despite previous costly failures. Example this time in Italy, courtesy of the New York Times.
After shutting down a previous line that made panels a third less efficient than Chinese technology, they are at it again:
CATANIA, Italy — The enormous glass building on the outskirts of this Sicilian city had been intended for making silicon wafers for flash memory chips. That plan got crushed by the global financial crisis.
Built in the early 2000s, it was overhauled in 2011 to churn out conventional panels used to build solar farms in Greece, Italy and South Africa. Once again, the factory struggled, this time losing ground to Chinese rivals that trumped it on price, as well as on technology.
They speak of ENEL as if it were a utility company:
Now, the facility’s owner, the Italian utility Enel, is changing tack again, betting on an advanced, commercially untested system for solar panels. This time, Enel hopes it finally has what it takes to challenge the industry behemoth — China.
But these are ENEL owners, data from 2017, starting with the most important one (https://www.marketscreener.com/ENEL-70935/company/):
Name Equities %
Government of Italy 2,397,856,331 23.60%
The Vanguard Group, Inc. 204,756,632 2.01%
Norges Bank Investment Management 192,438,206 1.89%
BlackRock Fund Advisors 134,870,693 1.33%
Capital Research & Management Co (World Investors) 129,335,830 1.27%
BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Ltd. 110,581,006 1.09%
Capital Research & Management Co (Global Invest's) 102,060,459 1.00%
Franklin Mutual Advisers LLC 87,716,590 0.86%
JPMorgan Asset Management (UK) Ltd 80,839,145 0.80%
BlackRock Advisors (UK) Ltd. 62,558,753 0.62%
And now, again after about two decades trying and losing money, they are at it again:
Enel believes that by focusing on an esoteric technology, it can afford to make panels here and avoid a price war. It hopes that its products, which can capture more energy from the sun’s rays than those of rivals, will offer greater value than cheaper models.
China is a tough challenger to beat. The country’s manufacturers have established giant factories, complex supply chains and global networks of suppliers. Having driven prices relentlessly lower, they, too, are now innovating, rivaling the world’s best in efficiency while scoring breakthroughs like building enormous floating solar farms or experimenting with installing solar panels in roads.
“Making solar power is not rocket science,” said Jenny Chase, a solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research firm. “It is something you can do more cheaply when you have a big manufacturing base.”
[...]
In the latest such instance, as prices for solar power dropped sharply in recent years, the Italian utility came to a difficult conclusion: Its panels were already a third less efficient than those developed by Chinese manufacturers, and that gap is likely to widen over time.
“We said to ourselves: ‘We have bought the company. What do we do?’” said Antonello Irace, the head of the Catania unit, known as EGP 3Sun.
Mr. Irace eventually admitted defeat, shutting down the old production line last fall to retool the plant.
How is this new production line getting the money? Are they competing with others, or are they getting their backs covered? See the guarantors:
Enel is spending 87.5 million euros, or about $101 million, on new equipment and other changes, of which the Italian government is chipping in €14 million. The European Union is adding an extra €9 million to help cover operating expenses.Deep, intelligent intervention of a patriotic man, who fights for the greening of the economy, the planet's health and for all of humanity:
The Catania plant is likely to begin producing state-of-the-art solar panels next year, after trial runs in the coming months. It is embracing heterojunction technology, a system that has not been commercially proven. It involves adding a new, microscopic layer of silicon to solar cells, increasing their ability to gather sunlight and convert it into electricity.
These new panels will also be “bifacial,” meaning they will be able to gather light not only directly from the sun but also from stray beams that bounce off the ground.
Enel expects that panels made in the first year will be able to convert around 20 percent of sunlight to energy, which is toward the higher end of industry averages. It hopes to reach 25 percent in five years — which would help offset their higher cost.
That could make a big difference in winning projects. Bids on giant solar farms worth hundreds of millions of dollars are increasingly price sensitive, and costs are falling fast.
Mr. Irace said the new designs were especially promising for the sunny Middle East, where countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been ramping up solar programs.
Those efforts may amount to little, however, if Enel cannot produce its panels on a larger scale, sufficient to compete with rivals from China.
For now, Enel aims to produce around 500,000 panels a year, a drop in the bucket compared with its Chinese competitors. In effect, it is “shipping cartons and crates,” said Chris Buckland, head of technology at Lightsource BP, a British solar developer. By contrast, Chinese companies are filling “40-foot containers.”
The Italian utility’s difficulties ramping up output point to the vastly changing fortunes of the solar sectors in Europe and China.
[...]
That is the route Enel is trying to follow in Sicily. Although heterojunction technology is not patented, Enel hopes that refinements it has made to the manufacturing process will give it a head start on rivals.
“We have to manufacture modern, advanced, innovative products in their initial life cycle,” said Antonio Cammisecra, the chief executive of Enel Green Power.
This is the real reason for the governments support (with both federal and national level backers): Government assistance to regions, according to quotas:
If Enel succeeds, it will give a crucial lift to a region that has lost as much as a quarter of its industrial capacity since the financial crisis, said Armando Castronuovo, an expert on the area at the University of Catania. The city’s economic backbone — agribusiness and tourism — has held up relatively well, but youth unemployment remains around 40 percent.
Enel has drawn on the local university to find the advanced science graduates necessary to ensure it can continue to come up with cutting-edge technology. In all, it has preserved some 300 jobs at the plant and a nearby research center.
There is nothing that can be done, since everybody has stakes in this kind of fraud. The citizen expects to take some of the spoils of the Treasury to give employment or at least subsidies to their children. And the politician gives his closest ones good jobs and a future.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment