If you've ever spent any time in Germany you know it's far from a sunny summer paradise. In fact, as Slate (hat tip for the story, by the way) points out, as far as solar is concerned, The US has better potential than Spain and Germany is a lot more like Alaska.
Yea. Alaska.
That said, there's almost nothing in this entire discussion of the solar industry that's accurate. Yes, we subsidize the solar industry but we subsidize almost every emergent industry -- that's where new industries come from.
The reason Solyndra collapsed wasn't that the Chinese decided to subsidize their solar industry more and that we doubled down on the bet. It collapsed because Solyndra was an attempt to build solar panels without a specific and very expensive material and the Chinese flooded the market with huge amounts of that material at rock bottom prices.
Chinese market manipulation didn't change the fundamental vulnerability of the solar market nor the importance of Solyndra's technology but it did succeed in damaging US competitiveness in solar energy... though only because Republicans and their allies at Fox News weren't willing to back American ingenuity.
Here's the clip. If you're looking for the "sunny" comment it's towards the end of the video.
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