President Joe Biden's clean-energy agenda is dealing with yet another headache — an investigation by his own Commerce Department that found rampant cheating in solar imports from Asia. The probe, which much of the industry has been dreading for months, found that four Chinese solar manufacturers are dodging U.S. tariffs by using factories in Southeast Asia to assemble their products. Today's draft finding could lead to new wide-ranging tariffs on solar panels and cells imported from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, David Iaconangelo writes for POLITICO's E&E News . That, in turn, might jack up costs for U.S. solar companies that use components from those countries — just as the industry has been hoping to reap the benefits from incentives in Biden's new climate law. The four Southeastern Asian countries named in the probe supply about 80 percent of imported U.S. solar modules, POLITICO's Kelsey Tamborrino writes . While the new climate law aims to spur a resurgence in U.S. solar manufacturing, industry groups warn that that won't happen soon enough to blunt the havoc caused by jacked-up tariffs. Commerce's finding "will strand billions of dollars worth of American clean energy investments and result in the significant loss of good-paying, American, clean energy jobs," said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, in a statement today. The department is expected to issue a final ruling in May. An industry divided A complaint from California-based solar panel maker Auxin Solar instigated the probe in February . But many U.S. solar installers and developers have castigated the Commerce investigation, calling it a threat to Biden's overarching goal of weaning the U.S. power sector off fossil fuels. Biden sought to get ahead of the ruling in June by imposing a two-year stay for any tariffs that may come from the investigation. Biden also invoked the Defense Production Act to help ramp up domestic solar production. But Ross Hopper said the two-year window will not be enough to prop up America's solar supply chain. One bright spot for the probe's critics: Commerce declined to propose blanket bans on imports from the four countries in question.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment