European manufacturing
Europe can design a cell, certify a cell and finance a cell. It has very nearly stopped making one.
Europe should make more of what it depends on.
Four steps, and where they went
Polysilicon
Refined in very few places, for reasons that are about electricity price and permitting, not about chemistry.
Ingot and wafer
The step Europe lost first and talks about least. Capital-heavy, unglamorous, and the hinge the rest of the chain turns on.
Cell
Where the efficiency headlines live, and where European research is genuinely competitive.
Module
The step that gets re-shored first because it is the cheapest to re-shore — which is also why doing only this proves nothing.
Why now and not before
The honest version of the argument is not that European manufacturing would be cheaper. It would not be, and anyone who opens with that has already lost the room. It is that a supply chain with one geography in it is not a supply chain. It is a hope with invoices attached.
What makes this buildable now rather than five years ago is unremarkable and entirely structural: permitting timelines that no longer outlive the equipment order, an industrial electricity price that can be contracted rather than guessed at, and buyers who have started writing origin into the tender rather than the press release.
None of that is a technology story. It is the reason the technology story finally gets to happen.
Every conversation used to end with somebody saying Asia, and everybody nodding.
I stopped nodding. It turns out that is most of what starting something consists of.