Thomas Freidman about solar panel factories and squandered employment opportunities.

Applied Materials is an important U.S. company that makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer.

In 2004 Mike Splinter, Applied Materials’s C.E.O., decided to add a new business line to take advantage of the company’s nanotechnology capabilities — making the machines that make solar panels.     

Applied built14 solar panel factories around the world in the last two years... Not a single one is in America...  “Invented here, sold there.”

The reason that all these other countries are building solar-panel industries today is because most of their governments have put in place the three prerequisites for growing a renewable energy industry:
1) any business or homeowner can generate solar energy;
2) if they decide to do so, the power utility has to connect them to the grid; and
3) the utility has to buy the power for a predictable period at a price that is a no-brainer good deal for the family or business putting the solar panels on their rooftop.

Regulatory, price and connectivity certainty is what Germany put in place.
Germany now generates almost half the solar power in the world today and, as a byproduct, is making itself the world-center for solar research, engineering, manufacturing and installation.

With more than 50,000 new jobs, the renewable energy industry in Germany is now second only to its auto industry.

One thing that has never existed in America — with our fragmented, stop-start solar subsidies — is certainty of price, connectivity and regulation on a national basis.
Consumer demand for solar power has not been enough for anyone to have Applied Materials build them a factory in America. 
... federal and state subsidies for installing solar systems are largely paying for the cost of importing solar panels made in China, by Chinese workers, using hi-tech manufacturing equipment invented in America.