[ExI] solargate: was RE: A Nobel laureate and climate change

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of BillK
Subject: Re: [ExI] solargate: was RE: A Nobel laureate and climate change

On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 9:51 PM, spike wrote:
>> Solyndra did not reduce production costs, because they could not.  
>> No sane investor would have put money into Solyndra because their 
>> factory was in a non-right-to-work state...

>...I been reading the reports about Solyndra and the financial people don't
appear to be claiming that wage costs were the big problem. Only the
traditional union bashers are doing this. The situation is obviously
confused and being investigated by the FBI. There may even be fraud
involved...

Perhaps so, but my argument is that Solyndra never had the *potential* to
get their wages down, even after the tooling and fixed assets were
capitalized.  There is a residual cost in wages and wages are stubbornly
high in California with little potential of dropping in the immediately
foreseeable.  If a factory here wishes to compete on any manufactured item,
they need a lights-out factory.  But that isn't what they were building.
That in itself was a disappointment: the Silicon Valley is a great high tech
center with the kinds of people needed to build a lights-out factory.  Then
the main market would be China and India.  But Solyndra didn't go after that
market niche, they went after the domestic market which couldn't afford
those products because of high unemployment.  This makes no sense.

There is another home solar niche I have been thinking about: one that can
be expanded with minimal installation cost.  Now we have these big panels
that are costly and require an electrician to install.  So to get into the
game costs many thousands of dollars up front.  What we need is some kind of
solar product that can be started small and expanded a couple hundred
dollars at a time, that can be installed by the homeowner.

spike