Energy is expensive again. The Iran crisis has sent electricity prices climbing, the Strait of Hormuz has become a bargaining chip in the Gulf, and you feel it immediately on your power bill.
And right now, of all moments, the factories that build the antidote stand idle.
The economic historian Adam Tooze just nailed it in the Financial Times: we live in a world with a surplus of solar panels. Let that sink in.
China can now produce around 1,000 gigawatts of solar panels a year — more than the entire world can install. More than 40 Chinese manufacturers have gone bust, been bought out or delisted. Panels have never been cheaper. Clean energy in abundance — and the world just shrugs.
Better too much than too little
Honestly, the overproduction bothers me the least. For the Chinese manufacturers it's painful, sure. But I'd rather have too many panels at rock-bottom prices than too few at sky-high ones.
That said, China didn't exactly play clean. Without massive — and probably partly illegal — subsidies, this industry would never have grown so big so fast. But that doesn't change the outcome. The panels are here, they work, and they're cheap.
Europe simply slept through it
What really annoys me isn't China. It's that we let it die.
Germany had a solar industry. Q-Cells, Solarworld — these were once world leaders. And then, instead of gently adjusting the subsidies to match falling prices, we slashed them overnight. Instead of easing off, we pulled the plug.
The result: one bankruptcy after another, the know-how handed to China for free. When I think about what happened under Merkel, I'd like to kick someone in the backside.
Does that mean Europe shouldn't subsidise now? On the contrary. China did it — so it's only fair for Europe to do it too and try to rebuild its own production.
We just shouldn't kid ourselves: the panel itself is only a fraction of the cost of a finished installation. Inverter, mounting, installers, red tape — that's where most of the money goes. A panel factory alone won't make us independent. But relying on China for everything, forever, is no strategy either. It's simply dumb that we slept through this.
The real elephant: too beautiful for sunshine
And now the part that infuriates me most here in South Tyrol.
We have the cheapest clean energy in human history practically within reach — and we say: no thanks, too ugly.
A permit for a system? Denied. Wind turbines? Rejected. Ground-mounted solar? Banned. All in the name of the beauty of our landscape.
The logic is breathtaking: our mountains must stay untouched — but somewhere else in the world, somewhere supposedly less beautiful, the fields can be carpeted with panels. Clean power, yes please, but kindly out of sight.
That's the elephant in the room. Not China, not the overproduction, not even Merkel. It's the hypocrisy of demanding the energy transition while blocking every panel you might see from your own terrace.
The cheapest miracle in the world
Solar panels aren't a slab of metal like steel or cement. They turn us into farmers of the sun. Half a century of research went into them, and the result now costs almost nothing.
2026 is the year we had "more than enough" of them. And the only thing we could think to do was look away — because they were too cheap, too Chinese, or too ugly for us.
Source: Adam Tooze, "Wasting China's solar panel surplus is madness", Financial Times, June 2026.