When US national investments succeed and fail by Henry Kressel SOURCE: Asia Times

"What eventually succeeded in building China’s low-cost, high-performance solar panel industry was a complete rethinking of the elements and methods to reduce costs by clever vertical integration. This required billions of dollars of investment to design and build such factories. The funding was there to do it in China. This scale of industry building was never in the program here, hence the difference. Having decided to build the solar panel industry, China’s investment program was comprehensive and ingenious."