A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

June 1st 2012

Department Of Commerce Takes A Hit At Chinese Wind Power Next

It would seem that the Department of Commerce has chosen its next target to slap some hefty trade tariffs on, that certainly didn’t take too long eh? This time they’ve stayed in China, but gone for another of the potential renewable winners of the world, wind energy, quoting the same old story as last.

Last December, the DoC received complaints from multiple American wind companies complaining that China was yet again unfairly subsidising and trading its domestic wind towers, reducing costs and outcompeting other manufacturers, namely in the US. By reducing their trading costs out of China, in an uncannily similar vein to the recent solar trade war, the US market is being flooded by cheap-as-chips wind towers designed for large-scale generation of 100KW and over.

Of course, the US they again doesn’t agree with this whatsoever, and has chosen to file preliminary reports to determine what value to set the counter-tariffs at, with both China and Vietnam under scrutiny, who has also been seen to be ‘unfairly’ trading its wind capacity. As many of you who have followed the solar mess that is the anti-dumping case, it has not only brought anger and protest from both US and Chinese sides, but has been suggested to be threatening the entire solar industry as a whole, and no doubt this will have the same effect on the wind industry.

What differs between both cases however is the size of each respective nation’s wind industry size. The US has been steadily throwing up wind towers in recent years in bigger and bigger quantities, and now has a formidable wind-generation capacity, whereas China’s influence in the market is much smaller, with solar their chosen renewable path.

So, my question is this…why start yet another trade dispute between China and themselves, when the DoC knows, 1) how much consumers/manufacturers/sellers rallied against the solar tariffs, and 2) when wind energy is in the best interest of everybody to continue growing worldwide, especially in the dirtier Asian countries yet to move on from coal; China’s industry is only small and this response could severely cripple it.

Posted at 9:46am and tagged with: wind energy, electricity, china, us, department of commerce, tariff, trade, market, manufacturing, science, solar, america, anti-dumping,.

May 17th 2012

Chinese Solar Tariffs Hide Some Unfortunate Truths

First of all, I just want to say a quick apology for the distinct lack of posts in the past 3 days, a detour from my usual every other day/daily posts. Basically, university work is to blame for it; dissertation has finally been handed in but two more exams sit lurking in front of me, so I’ll likely be taking a bit of a downtime between each post, but do not worry (if you even read this blog, I love you if you do), I’ll be back on form and free in two weeks time.

Now that that’s out of the way, onto the subject of todays post - those pesky Chinese and the apparent trade war between their solar capacity and the US. I wrote a blog on this relatively recently detailing why the Chinese were being scorned for their solar trade practice, and why even back then I felt it was a bad idea for everyone involved.

I’ll quickly recap just to jog my own and any reader’s memories.

The US found out that the Chinese government had been quite heavily subsidising their solar industry, namely SunTech, in a move to make their solar panels cheaper to make, easier to ship and to effectively flood the global market. As the US doesn’t like competition they see as unfair, they set about placing tariffs on the Chinese market to the tune of as much as 4.3%, to alleviate the apparently anti-trade practices.

When I initially blogged about this, I, and I’m sure many others thought that the whole thing was a mess, and entirely unnecessary in the grand scheme of things. Chinese solar is good, and theres nothing we can do about it. If they can manage to flood the market with quality solar panels at cheap prices and in abundant amounts, why should the US stifle this growth in place of its more expensive types? Surely as long as the world is getting solar, from multiple other countries aside from the US and China, everyone is a winner? Well that was my thinking at the time at least.

Now it has been revealed that, the night before the tariff decision was made on Monday, the American organisation, the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE), has called for all seven members of the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing (CASM) to release their own books on the subsidies, tax breaks and government help they have received in their time. This is a truly inspired move, with the president of CASE, Jigar Shah, highlighting how the original Chinese-US tariff war demanded clarity on Chinese solar, and yet there was no clarity with US-owned companies. By ordering the release of such information, the true story unravelled quickly.

Posted at 10:12am and tagged with: China, solar, US, trade, war, tariff, energy, industry, manufacturing, truth, SunTech, market, economy, subsidies, government, dumb, stupid,.