The NYT recently published a piece about cheap solar panels, and their knock-on effects, rapidly changing the electrical infrastructure, demand, and geo-politics within South Africa. As you might imagine, China is the country building, supplying, and financing the panels, both for residential use, but also for larger utility scale projects.

This is something of a “what have we learned?” moment.

• The United States had early momentum in this space, for a spell a few decades ago we were the leader in solar manufacturing and global supply, but there wasn’t enough of a market.
• In recent years, solar installation was a blossoming and booming industry that was successful in part due to strong federal incentives. These incentives have been lost as part of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” While the US installer industry is still in a good (not great) place, it’s reliant on parts and panels manufactured elsewhere – namely China. This is familiar story, we lost the manufacturing race writ large to China over the course of decades, and solar panels and associated parts are no different.
• The drivers for the solar install demand in the United States are not so different from South Africa. The United States does not have a modern grid, energy prices are rising, and the desire to be “completely independent” is a strong American tradition. To a certain degree, this article feels more like a mirror than we might care to admit.
• The United States has put forth a muddled strategy on energy policy, right at a time when demand is increasing significantly due to AI computing needs. We’re looking for massive increases in power generation (ie. nuclear, which I support) to be the solution, while moving incentives away from decentralized efforts like residential solar and energy storage. That’s not to say that one is better than the other, rather, we need all of these things all at once to create a more stable central grid (the hub), backed by a robust, decentralized model of residential power generation and storage (the spoke).

As a country that is always desiring to exert influence and power globally, we need more rather than fewer arrows in our quiver. What China is able to roll out in South Africa is something that we will not be able to do in the near future, because we can’t even do it in our own backyard. When we get back to the point of understanding that we’ll need residential solar and storage, will we still have a domestic industry that can support the build out?