While Vice President Kamala Harris champions green energy, the current administration’s preferential treatment of companies such as South Korea’s Hanwha QCells, despite ties to slave labor, raises serious questions about the sincerity of additional commitments to human rights.
For many consumers, installing rooftop solar that generates enough surplus power to sell back to the grid for a profit seems like a win-win. Lower power bills, cleaner energy — everybody wins. Well, almost everybody. Unfortunately, many solar panels imported into the United States are the product of slave labor in China. This contradiction underscores a moral crisis in our nation’s green energy strategy — one that compromises human rights in pursuit of environmental goals.
The most important material for manufacturing solar panels is polysilicon. It’s as essential to solar energy as crude oil is to gasoline. Basically, polysilicon is formed into tube-shaped ingots, sliced into wafers, and then made into individual cells that fill a solar panel. While the U.S. has ample capacity to produce solar panels, China accounts for 95% of the global polysilicon, ingot, and wafer production.
The link between polysilicon and human rights abuses may not be immediately clear, but the reality is shocking: 45% of the global supply of this material used to power green energy in America is produced through slave labor in Xinjiang, China, with an additional 30% from elsewhere in China. If you’re unfamiliar with Xinjiang, it is home to roughly 11 million Uyghurs, a mostly Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic group. Over the last decade, the Chinese government has detained upwards of 2 million Uyghurs and subjected them to sterilization, imprisonment, and slave labor. The U.S. government officially labeled this campaign as “genocide.”
Every polysilicon manufacturer in Xinjiang engages in or benefits from slave labor. The remaining supply coming from China is likely commingled. Even if it weren’t, it would be impossible to prove otherwise.
Multiple legislative efforts have been made to address the supply-chain problem. The most well-known is the Inflation Reduction Act, offering billions of dollars in tax incentives to produce renewable energy. In the solar industry, the main incentives are for module and panel construction. Since the IRA’s enactment, there’s been a massive increase in module capacity in the U.S. The trade-off is that this capacity can’t currently be met by domestic suppliers alone.
Since 2021, it’s been illegal to import goods made with Uyghur slave labor into the U.S., and anything coming from Xinjiang is assumed under the law to be tainted. To get around U.S. sanctions, Chinese polysilicon and wafer manufacturers launder their products through third-party countries such as Malaysia, South Korea, and India before shipping wafers to the U.S. to be manufactured into modules.
To name a few: India’s Waaree Energies “has sent millions of panels to the US with components from Chinese company Longi Green Energy Technology, whose products were repeatedly denied entry to the US market over concerns about forced labor.” Canadian Solar, a Chinese company nominally headquartered in Canada with major projects in Texas, recently opened a new facility in Xinjiang, supervised by CCP officials, no less. South Korea’s Hanwha QCells was recently exposed for having significant exposure to slave labor. Each of these companies will claim hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits under the IRA.
Of these, QCells is the most problematic. The White House and the Harris campaign are touting its expansion in Dalton, Georgia, a swing state, to sell the benefits of the IRA. Additionally, this July, QCells became the official preferred solar provider for the U.S. government, giving it a lucrative inside track over its competitors. What’s more, in August, the Energy Department awarded QCells a $1.45 billion loan guarantee. Combined, these actions make QCells an extremely safe bet for investors.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. was recently one of the world’s biggest producers of solar-grade polysilicon. That was until the incentive structure pointed toward higher profit and more refined polysilicon used in computer chips. American producers couldn’t compete with the flood of cheap Chinese polysilicon, undercut by virtually nonexistent labor costs.
One of the IRA’s goals was to create a domestic supply chain for green energy. While well-intentioned, focusing on power-generating capacity didn’t provide enough incentives for the necessary upstream parts of the supply chain, such as polysilicon, ingots, and wafers, to wean the U.S. off our dependence on slave labor.
Environmental activists fear that eliminating cheap Chinese imports will get in the way of our green-energy goals and have a tendency to put their heads in the sand on this matter. It’s a cynical and depressing reflection of our polarized political environment that views everything as zero-sum. If we need to rely on slave labor to save the planet, who are we saving it for?
It’s time to reorient the incentives of the IRA to ensure that we build a truly ethical green-energy economy. Millions of Uyghurs are suffering to meet global demand, and every time we install panels, we become complicit in their oppression. If we are to fight for a sustainable future, it must be a future rooted in moral clarity. The challenge isn’t insurmountable, but it requires leaders to prioritize both environmental sustainability and human dignity.
Continue Reading at The Washington Examiner.