PV and their infrastructure has service costs, limited lifetimes of components and their associated write off costs as well. Costs which are for the moment higher than fuelling the fossil fuel plants, which you'll need to maintain as backup any way. The cost of that necessary backup needs to be added to the cost of PV.
Yes, but that's
today, where solar plants are purely used for electricity production.
I'm talking about building a solar-powered PV-panel production factory. This changes the economics significantly because such a plant has two outputs, electricity
and solar panels.
There has to be a tipping point where the panels become free to produce. Wages, transport costs, etc., are paid for by selling the electricity produced by those panels. Eventually a s tipping point will be reached where the whole system becomes self sustaining and electricity costs will plummet.
Yes, it will cost money to build but:
a) It's a worthwhile investment, much better than warmongering and bailing out wall-street bankers.
b) Not doing this, continuing to burn fossil fuels, has a much bigger long term cost (90% likely to be catastrophic for the economy).
c) The first country to do it will have a massive manufacturing advantage over the rest of the world and will easily recover the startup cost.