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Bosch Finds Solar Business Unprofitable, Exits
New submitter rwise2112 writes "German engineering company Bosch said Friday that it is abandoning its solar energy business, because there is no way to make it economically viable.'We have considered the latest technological advances, cost-reduction potential and strategic alignment, and there have also been talks with potential partners,' Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner said. 'However, none of these possibilities resulted in a solution for the solar energy division that would be economically viable over the long term.'"
But I'm also aware without government subsidies, it's not economically viable. On the large scale.
That said, I love having a solar panel on my pack when I'm out hiking. It is a nice option when you're somewhere without access to the grid.
They probably mean that they cannot make enough money on it. Economically viable means that your situation (literally your household) improves. Most probably they are economically far more viable than cheap polluting alternatives.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The reason it is unprofitable is because China is flooding the market with panels that cost less than the production cost. If China was punished for its behavior, these companies would be able to compete and stay in business.
"European makers of solar energy have accused low cost Asian competitors, especially manufacturers from China, of creating the trouble for their western peers, partly by flooding the market with products at prices far below production costs."
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
If I were hiking, I'd go for a battery charger for a flashlight, cell phone and/or GPS. I know people who'd go for coffee pots or powered water filters.
But mostly I can see chargers for those little battery powered nicities.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Those "latitudes" are rich in oil and gas, better deal.
If cars need gas, we'll either need to figure out how to create gas from atmospheric CO2 (probably more biodiesel) or give up on cars in not too terribly long. Eh. Electric or hydrogen will work, it will just take time to ramp up.
As for power plants. I can certainly see Nuclear as been a good and viable plan for the future (keep them away from coasts and tectonically active regions), but... What is wrong with also using solar? In areas where there is a lot of sunlight, and low enough latitude, solar is a perfectly viable solution. If it can be almost viable in Germany, there are certainly many parts of Africa, the American Southwest, and Central America that could use it just fine.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I have solar and an electric car. It is an amazing combination. A 10Kw grid-tie system is now about $3/watt installed, and that drops to $2/watt after a 30% tax credit. If most new houses built included a solar panel on the roof, I could see the US becoming energy independent in a decade.
Seriously, do I have to think of everything?
Look you can produce a product, put it on the market, blah blah blah. Fuck that. Do what lockheed does.
1. Open a number of plants within the US, get the politicians to give speeches about how wonderful each plant will be locally. Make sure to choose towns that would be as deastated as possible by any future plant closure.
2. Lobby congress directly to buy the solar panels as a national security issue, and ignoring any irresponsible departments who claim they are not cost effective or they don't need them.
3. If #2 doesn't work right away, threaten to close individual plants, rinse and repeat until congress orders enough to ensure your profits. Be sure to tell your employees that the plant might be closing because of the uncertainty around government orders. Try to get the whole town involved.
4. Once they are buying them, get them to throw a few orders into the foriegn aid bucket. (Isreal needs solar power to keep it safe from Iran!)
5. Profit.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Or maybe we should look for other alternatives than PV. Of course distributed power generation isn't efficient.
You mean one powered by a solar-cell that's driven by the light in the refrigerator? But what happens when you close the door?
The low cost provider will ALWAYS make money.
The High quality provider may or may not make money.
The also rans usually get eaten up by the low cost provider.
The fact that your particular company fails in a business is a failure of YOU, not the business. It means you can't compete with the rest of the world.
When Bosch leaves, it lets everyone else raise their prices just a little bit.
Maybe that will be enough to make the rest of the corporations profitable. Or maybe some more 'also rans' may have to quit because THEY are losing money.
But I guarantee you, once enough also rans have left the business, the rest of the people will make money hand over fist.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
electric cars only suck because our battery technology sucks. But there's nothing in the laws of physics that says you can't make batteries that don't suck.
(triple negative... yikes)
Somebody's gonna come up with a new battery that exploits quantum effects and raises energy density by 10x. The world will be theirs.
Hell, just yesterday I saw a Slashdot article about Lockeed Martin coming up with a new nano-material that decreases water desalinization energy requirement by 100x. We're just scratching the surface when it comes to nano-sized materials and quantum effects (which are related to nano stuff cuz they only happen at very small scales)
In a word, yes.
Money is a proxy here for the input/output ratio of resources, energy and labor.
Not making money means consuming more in energy, resources and labor than you get in return. That in itself isn't good for the planet, or us uncultured swines.
What you probably want to whine about is not producing ENOUGH money to satisfy investors. Then we get into opportunity costs, and deeper into economics that I want to bother going in this post.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Just makes things easier for SolarCity.
Petroleum isn't economically viable over the long term either.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I want a nuclear powered electric car.
A co-worker of mine has one. It's powered (mainly) by the nuclear plant up the road.
I have one of these, clicky which charges a LiPoly unit from a panel on top of my backpack. Well, the LiPoly unit never got fully charged, and then dumping that into a camera or GPS, hardly worth the bother. And you see that wire linking the panel to the battery pack? It got ripped off going through brush. I've seen the BioLite stove, which charges off a peltier from the fire's heat, but I'm not convinced. Any suggestions for something better?
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
No, it's called productivity.
The manufacturing costs for manufacturing a generally similar in both Europe and China, balancing German automation + power costs vs. Chinese labor costs.
What isn't the same is the after-cost of adhering to German vs. Chinese environmental regulations.
Most industrialized nations could easily save their local manufacturing bases by imposing requirements on products being manufactured in accordance to local environmental standards in the locations they are sold. It's optional whether they would want to impose environmental tarrifs and take the product anyway, despite "dirty" manufacturing, or simply block entry of the product into the country.
For China, depending on how far up the supply chain you wanted to push the requirement, you could take it to the point of requireing scrubbers on the stacks of the coal-fired power plants that powered the manufacturing facilities.
It's ironic that environmentalism has succeeded only in moving the mess out of view (to China), rather than keeping the mess from being injected into the global ecosystem anyway. But at least health care costs tend to go down when you have no local manufacturing going on, due to a reduction in pollutants.
Well Bosch is selling out of PV, so if you really think renewables are so essential, get you and your friends together and buy it up at the fire-sale prices!
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1945.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The laws of physics are pretty clear on batteries being inferior to fuel in terms of energy density. Those quantum effects you described are already exploited in fuels (chemistry is inherently quantum mechanical).
Water desalination is a very different problem, all together. (***Water desalination is very different problem!***)
Chemical fuels cannot be beat in terms of energy density (outside of nuclear fuels). However, they could feasibly be generated from grid energy and raw material. This is the concept behind the hydrogen economy: use grid energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then store the hydrogen as a fuel. Unfortunately, hydrogen is very difficult to store. An improved storage solution would be to take the process a step further and generate a liquid fuel, such as methanol or ethanol. It's a difficult problem to do this economically, though, and it likely will not be solved until there is adequately incentive (i.e. grid energy much cheaper than petroleum).
I'm not too worried about energy. Solar photovoltaics will be at grid parity before the end of the decade. A gradual shift away from fossil fuels is inevitable, simply from a cost basis, even ignoring external costs.
Unless, of course, there's a breakthrough in fusion. Economical fusion. Not the multi-billion dollar boondoggles currently receiving funding. A true breakthrough would change everything. Forever.
Destroy countries? The U.S is the only country in the world that when it wins a war then rebuilds the country they attacked!
Can you replace /build a solar cell with the energy it provides? I'm pretty sure you can't. Thus it's not sustainable and not really helping anybody.
What makes you so sure?
It seems to me that as a first approximation, if a solar cell lasts long enough to recoup its acquisition cost, it has generated at least as much energy as was used in its production. That's because the cost of the energy used in production is rolled into the acquisition cost of the cell.
This is not to say that some PV cells don't manage to recoup the energy used in their production, e.g. PV cells used in spacecraft.
Anyhow ten seconds with Google Scholar produced the following abstract
Citation: Pearce, J., & Lau, A. (2002). Net energy analysis for sustainable energy production from silicon based solar cells. ASME.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
...but part of the design of the core of the Internet is that it is, in fact, designed to survive a nuclear war.
Which isn't to say you'd have much of the Internet left, but if it wasn't fried by EMP, you could start reconfiguring your routers to connect with surviving nodes.
The backbone of the internet should survive as it was intended, but the more local components (ISPs) would probably fail. Many customers only have 99% or 99.9% uptime, and this is with the power grid working more-or-less correctly.
For this to actually work, we would probably find ourselves switching to a loose-coupled wireless internet (at least for the ISP piece), which is something that has been researched.
As for power plants. I can certainly see Nuclear as been a good and viable plan for the future (keep them away from coasts and tectonically active regions), but... What is wrong with also using solar?
Solar doesn't have the density or the reliability to even be considered a competitor to nuclear.
Every watt of solar power needs some other type of reliable power generation to back it up. (or the application relying on solar is something that can be easily shut down)
It's not too big a deal if your lights go out. You won't like it if your internet goes out. The factory churning out widgets will NOT accept the power going out because of a cloudy day.
Because solar cannot provide reliable baseline power generation, you're asking the wrong question. "Why can't we use solar?" should be replaced with, "what baseline power generation techniques are environmentally friendly?"
The answer to *that* question is most definitely not solar, or wind, or any of the other "green power" fads.
Actually, the Internet is a Steve Jobs' invention.
Yeah Cisco totally hooked me up with this $22 000 router. What a bargain!
Perhaps this is some subtle internet humor, but if you actually follow that link, it contradicts what our ubiquitous friend Anonymous Coward says. The bit about surviving a nuclear war is discussed in a section labeled "Misconceptions of design goals".
(And as long as I'm responding to trolls, may I point out that Al Gore does indeed have a plausible claim to being the guy who created the internet.)
It is so heavily subsided it isn't funny. For example if you install solar panel, you get to sell your electricity back to utility at a *higher* price than what the utility sell normal electricty (from gas or coal) do. That "cost parity" you cite is actually quite artificial in germany. In fact would the subsidie disappear and the utilitiies pay the market price, nobody would by solar. Low insolation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SolarGIS-Solar-map-Europe-en.png most germany is about 1000 kw.h/m^2/year with a bit of spike toward 1100 in the south) where the united state is mostly 2.400 kw.h./m^2/year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NREL_USA_PV_map_lo-res_2008.jpg multiply by 365) even the northern part of the US seems to get more than the southern part of germany.
And we are speaking of very heavy subsidy here , to the tune of more than 10 billion per year until recentely when they were slightly lowered.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Blasphemy.
Inventing something implies he did not know it already.
The Omnipotent Lord our Jobs willed the internet into existence when humanity was ready to ascend one step closer to true enlightenment.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Externalities aren't subsidies. A subsidy is a gift of value to the target while an externality is the imposition of a cost on a third party.