Who Looks Forward more Environmentally: U.S. or China?

i never bought the "proliferation of manufacturing jobs" since only jobs with extensive assembly requirements and special handling would employ a large #. these panels would be built in a plant similar to a fab. very highly technical and controlled environment which would mean very high start up costs which would require a very large plant, very large volume, so sure a single location may employ 5,000 or so (24 hour operation would be the easiest way to recup the investment) but there would not be a demand for a lot of plants so total manufacturing jobs might reach 30-50,000 in ten years. barely a drop in the bucket.

but sales, distribution and installation would be a few hundred people employed locally but scattered thru-out the country requiring several hundred locations can could easily total over a million in the same ten year period.

as far as managing toxic waste. it is something that can be done. we simply dont have a favorable mindset to do so. ignorance in this field is unbelievably rampant. when i worked at Intel, a lot of the changes they made were (albeit, a "little" late) "no brainer" solutions that made a huge impact to their environmental footprint and many adjustments did not cost a ton of money.

they did spend some capital putting in a sort of mini preprocessing plant for waste. now it did not eliminate the toxicity, but somehow changed it into a form that could be more easily packaged, transported and disposed of properly



i also worked at Weyerhaeuser Paper and they were forced to do the same thing due to their location near wetlands in Lacey, WA back in the late 80's. their process actually distilled the harmful stuff, then it was dried and packaged in 250 gal drums for pickup. so basically went from dumping several hundred thousand gallons of lightly contaminated water to disposing one drum about once every 10 days or so.

so, toxins are a problem, but hardly an insurmountable one. and i cant help but feel that our current problems dealing with the continuance of burning gasoline is one that we have been dealing with for years but with very unsuccessful results. maybe its time to tackle a different set of problems

 

This study went into detail

http://204.154.137.14/technologies/coalpower/cctc/resources/pdfsmisc/haps/M97051055.pdf

Other studies are out there too

THe good thing about ARRA is domestic sourcing. Contrast the output of the Arizona plant, to total US demand, to CHinese PV output