I was speaking to a solar panel prospect of mine a while back. I was telling him how he probably should not buy panels made by Sun Tech because you can’t really trust the reliability of high-tech products from China. I started talking about Harbor Freight and he told me a story.
He went to China recently, up the Yangtze River and some of those “brand new” cities that are being built there. I had heard a while back that China is building a city every week (!!). He had gone into one of these cities of like a million people or so. He described how every building is built to eight stories tall because at nine stories you have to put in an elevator, so there are all of these 8 story walk-ups. He saw a person there and he actually asked, “why did they put you in this old city?” because everything was broken down. All of the concrete on the sidewalks was cracked and everything looked… old. he met this gentleman who lives on the first floor of this eight story building. it was a farmer who had been transplanted there by the state into an apartment building. He was one of the many refugees from a dam expansion. Actually, it was the farmers niece’s apartment. so he was in the first floor of this eight story building and there were all of these really large cracks in the wall. That just can’t be good, being on the first floor of an eight story building that is three years old and it’s cracking and it looks like it’s going to fall apart. “So -that- is why”, I explained, “you should not buy Sun Tech panels.” And there is also the bit about how they’re probably dumping all of their toxic solar panel waste into that same river. That sure makes the panels cost less.
China is being built like Harbor Freight builds tools. I can imagine them saying, “Chromium is too expensive to put in steel, so we won’t use it. We’ll be fine without it.”
