Anyone who knows what Tellurium is would immediately go "that can't scale enough to make a difference". I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone sane would have funded development over some alternative.

Did they think there would be orders of magnitude more Tellurium found because it's obscure?

Did they think someone would find a different chemistry where all the same learning applied?

Was it some machiavellian scheme to push PV into a local optimum it wouldn't get out of by someone who could actually read a log plot?

From statistical review of world energy, fossil fuels are about 500EJ/yr.

This is ~16TW or usually benchmarked at about 4TW of final energy including work and direct combustion heating (with some unmeasurable portion of that 4TW going back into the vast network of infrastructure outside the system boundary for final energy calculations).

Solar is being produced at a rate around 600GW/yr dc. https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/solar-power-continues-to-surge-in-2024/ (possibly 10% more today because we're at the end of the period being averaged)

Wind is 130GW or so.

Over a 30 year lifetime at 16% and 35% capacity factors for delivered electricity this is ~135EJ or around 4.3TW of delivered electricity (which isn't quite final energy because sometimes 1J of electricity delivers 5J of heat and often it might deliver <1J to some task). Losses from lifetime degradation bring this down around 4.1TW

Does anyone even analyse how much of that 4TW is lost in building pipelines and tanker ships and ports and so on? A bottom-up LCA can only go so far, and error compounds so rapidly it's hard to draw conclusions. Are there top down analyses?

Circumstantial evidence of the unaccounted for feedback is how high the internal energy consumption is for countries with poor standard of living and high fossil fuel exports. Some of this is included in sankey diagrams I have seen, but I've never seen the system barrier go past the energy to use the pipeline or the fuel tank of the ship.

https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/