Why are solar panels and batteries from China so cheap: It's more to do with automation and state-of-the art manufacturing processes than cheap labour.

Interesting point about tariffs specifically in renewables:

[Tariffs are] not good interventions if the goal [is] to increase the number of energy jobs in European and American markets. That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).

The same article could be written about many things China produces, not just solar panels and batteries. China spent decades learning to dominate in high-volume, low-margin manufacturing. They developed massive economies of scale, and lots of manufacturing expertise, both of which translate to labor efficiency that other countries can't match.

The article also quietly mentions the fact that China has an abundance of cheap coal to power all those factories. That's a big part of its advantage in "Processing $" in the third figure.

Policy for abundance and competition matters a lot for China success. It starts with abundant raw material and processing. Steel and construction materials matters to factory building costs in addition to new energy production costs. It's unclear how much of abundance outcomes is the result of direct incentives to material producers/refiners vs "build it and they will come" attitudes that includes confidence in supporting clean energy/vehicles downstream.

In the west, oil oligarchy protectionism drives policy. History of oil companies patting themselves on the back with PR on clean energy while doing nothing. Funding massive disinformation and politicians for climate terrorism, and the solutions/progress that is made outside of oil companies is just extremely slow. Meant for PR and scarcity, and the hopes that high scarcity profits can be dressed up as rewarding national champions doing a little bit against global warming. Most of the IRA is not about creating US abundance, but rather setting up US monopolies in US supply chain, that have caused projects to stall because they are not competitive by US ROI standards, and the lack of confidence in usurping oil oligarchy for US only market.

Article starts off with "do we need domestic industry?" before not making any conclusions about it later. If Aliens came to earth to trade us cheap stuff, US oligarchy would insist on losing a war against the Aliens instead. Cheap energy and materials further makes jobs. Solar especially has up to 90% of its costs as local deployment spending. Cheap energy and materials is core to competitive manufacturing, and low consumer cost of living. The political reaction to go to war with competitive goods to protect domestic oligarchy profits, and pretend to support uncompetitive domestic upstarts with subsidies, is a net social loss. We end up with a high subsidy per job level, where UBI (full society redistribution) would enable more affordability of better products instead.

I believe this to an extent, but I think they're underplaying the cost of labor.

From personal experience, purchasing several MW of panels in an international market with limited supply chain regulation, there was a ~75% markup to procure panels with a traceable supply chain - it was unconfirmed but assumed the cheaper alternative came from Xinjiang.

You can maybe attribute some of that to just simple supply/demand. There's much more international demand, especially from wealthier countries like the US, for panels that are of known origin. But that said, I think there's a not insignificant % of that cost uplift that is labor.