Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China

http://www.nytimes.com/chrome/#/a/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environment/15solar.html

by yanw • 16 years ago

20 27 16 years ago

nytimes.com

PonyGumbo• 16 years ago

This is local for me. We're losing 800 jobs.

onteria• 16 years ago

This brings up some really weird reader that screws up the layout in Chrome. Here's a standard one page link instead:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environmen...

raintrees2• 16 years ago

Thanks for this link, I would have otherwise skipped this article for now. I received a warning that nyt was trying to store data on my system "for offline use."

knowtheory3• 16 years ago

The link above is to a page intended for the NYT's Google Chrome App. It does indeed cache articles and the like in your browser as per the HTML5 spec, so that if you were to lose your connectivity (say on a mobile device) you could continue to browse and review stuff the app has cached.

I happen to think that this layout is considerably less annoying than the NYT's main site.

pstuart• 16 years ago

It appears from the outset that Evergreen was operating in bad faith in accepting government stimulus, but they did have their back against the wall.

China has dirt cheap labor, no pollution regulations and strong government support -- how can any US manufacturing survive against that?

mikecarlucci• 16 years ago

According the article, and assuming Evergreen and China are honest about environmental regulations, the labor prices are not the real issue here. It's grants and loans made by the Chinese banks and local governments that are making up the bulk of the savings.

Still, $300 per month per employee in China vs $5400 in Massachusetts is going to turn some attention to China regardless of other costs.

ximeng2• 16 years ago

Would be interesting to know how polluting these factories are. I visited a solar panel factory in China and it was pretty much as described here: clean, white rooms, automated machines, protective clothing for staff. Didn't look like there was much sign of pollution.

The other question is the long term effect of this export of work to China. Can they really make a profit at this rate, or are they hoping that by selling below cost and concentrating manufacturing within China they will eventually be able to invest in research at a better return and one day start extracting economic rents on their monopoly in manufacturing knowledge.

knowtheory3• 16 years ago

This is the truly frustrating part of the article. It's so disheartening to hear that in spite of bailouts that we've made to the major financial institutions in the US, they won't lend to restart the economy and keep people employed.

john_horton• 16 years ago

On the bright side, the supposed force driving the move (plunging prices for solar panels) is a good thing.

melvinram• 16 years ago

I upvoted because I hadn't seen this layout for the NYT website before. It's kind of neat, especially when you click the X button the top right. Very cleanly laid out.

jws• 16 years ago

6.8 megabytes of downloaded data to read a single article.

That is my entire daily bandwidth budget on my wireless plan.

gaius• 16 years ago

This is how their iPad app looks.

Estragon• 16 years ago

It was completely unreadable for me, on firefox, ubuntu lynx. Fortunately, readability cleaned it up.

riobard4• 16 years ago

This is their Chrome webapp.

barrkel• 16 years ago

http://i.imgur.com/BAefW.png

Very clean :)

(Firefox 3.6.13 on Windows 7)

storm• 16 years ago

Completely fubar on my Nexus One - hangs for a half minute on load, then all I see is the categories/account/etc panel.

cagatayk• 16 years ago

So we're loaning the finance industry trillion dollars at essentially zero interest rate just so they can lend it back to federal government by buying treasuries and pocket the difference (and thus "recover from the crisis"), while China lends tens of billions dollars more than US does to solar energy companies. I hope I'm not the only one who finds the implications scary.

ck2• 16 years ago

This is exactly what is going to happen with the lithium battery technologies being developed for hybrids - lots of federal money being poured into research with no restrictions on where they are going to be made.

LiFePo4 battery technology was invented in the USA but now is mostly made in China.

Why do we protect corn with massive subsidies and massive import tariffs (creating horror shows of destructive ethanol, food products and animal feed) but not our technology and jobs?

riobard4• 16 years ago

You want all the (potential) pollution?

anonymous2463• 16 years ago

Citation? This seems to be a reflexive "counterpoint" to anybody who says that manufacturing can be done in the US.

I live near a car plant and have lived near a small semiconductor fab (in the US) and I can tell you that I've never seen any smoke or smelled anything. I've also lived in India and even small-scale industries used to emit smoke and smells (indicating chemicals).

The point being that China and India choose to pollute (to save costs), not that the technology to manufacture with low impact doesn't exist.

In almost any major US city, if you go a couple of miles perpendicular to most major roads, you will likely see some light industrial activity. It's usually so quiet and non-polluting that you don't even realize it's there. At least, that's been my experience. YMMV.

Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China

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