Australia’s Solar Sunshot manufacturing support scheme has launched its first phase, with $550 million AUD ($372 million USD) committed. Almost all of this first tranche consists of the 1a category, supporting solar module, glass, and tracker production with grants and subsidies, while $37 million of it is assigned to funding studies on solar panel manufacturing. The total scale of the Sunshot scheme will be $1 billion AUD (679 million USD). For context, India’s successful (because sufficiently generous) reshoring subsidy spending involved $10 billion for 50 GW of verticalized production capacity. Australia’s market scale is going to be 5 GW soon, and everything costs more in Australia than in India or China, which means that a fully verticalized reshoring program would…