US solar firms seek fix for 'illegal' China trade policies
Ever-cheaper solar panels are proving to be a good news, bad news proposition. While they seem great for efficiency-minded homeowners, businesses and schools, low-cost photovoltaics (PV) haven’t been kind lately to the US solar industry.
The problem, according to a group of US-based companies that make solar cells and panels, isn’t that material costs have been dropping and forcing PV prices downward — a worldwide average of 40 percent this year alone. It’s that China has massively subsidized PV manufacturing and “dumped” low-cost products onto overseas markets, the group says.
SolarWorld, which is headquartered in Germany but operates manufacturing facilities in the US, is now representing itself and six other US manufacturers — which aren’t being publicly named — in complaints about China’s PV subsidy policies. As the founding member of the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing, SolarWorld today filed complaints today with the US Department of Commerce and the International Trade Commission.
“Artificially low-priced solar products from China are crippling the domestic industry,” said Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld Industries America Inc., based in Hillsboro, Oregon. “China actually has no production cost advantage. Labor makes up a modest share of solar-industry costs, China’s labor is less productive, its raw material and equipment have come from the West and China must pay for long-distance shipping. Yet, massive state subsidies and sponsorship have enabled Chinese manufacturers to illegally dump their products into a wide-open US market.”
The news release from SolarWorld notes that seven US solar companies have shut down or downsized over the past year-and-a-half. (That list presumably includes Solyndra, which since declaring bankruptcy this year has become a lightning rod for critics of the Obama administration, as the company had received a $535 million loan guarantee from the US Department of Energy.)
SolarWorld also pointed out that imports of solar cells and panels from China have risen astronomically in recent years, with imports in July 2011 alone exceeding the total for 2010.
In its petitions, SolarWorld is asking the federal government to impose duties to provide relief to US-based manufacturers of crystalline silicon solar cells. The complaints don’t include thin-film solar cells made from cadmium telluride, copper indium gallium selenide or amorphous silicon. They also exclude non-photovoltaic technologies such as solar thermal and concentrated solar power.
SolarWorld’s complaints are more narrowly focused than those filed in 2010 by the United Steelworkers, which contend that China is engaging in illegal trade activities affecting the entire renewable energy industry.
