China's solar industry is in collapse.
Bill Powell says that after pinning its hopes on solar, Chinese firms are finding it to be a "capital destruction" machine:
These are epic, historic collapses in market valuation, made all the more stunning by the assumption, so prevalent just four years ago, that "clean" energy's time had come. How ironic it is that Barack Obama's insistence that the United States invest government money into the creation of so called "green jobs" -- which led to the debacle of Solyndra and other wasted investments -- was predicated on the fact that if the U.S. didn't do so, the industry of the future would be Made in China. A credulous political press, egged on by the environmental lobby, swallowed the reasoning wholesale.
Powell argues that solar's ability to reach "grid parity" - where it is price competitive with other fuel sources - has been dealt a big blow by the collapse in U.S. natural gas prices, but may yet still happen in China, where gas is still expensive. That is, until they start fracking.
