| More trustworthy link for the article: https://archive.fo/oD56w This is basically nonsense. Chinese solar panels are cheap because they are produced efficiently, with orders of magnitude less materials and energy than were required in 02012, when the US started imposing "anti-dumping" tariffs on them. I've read many of the US Department of Commerce filings on the topic attempting to argue that the current prices are unfairly subsidized. The arguments are embarrassingly bad, arguing over things like what the fair price of solar glass should be, or whether the fair price of the labor of Chinese solar panel assembly workers should be determined by comparing to Malaysian electronics assembly labor or Romanian electronics assembly labor. (They settled on Turkish labor.) Even when resorting to such absurd arguments, the countervailing tariffs the DoC decided it could justify were only in the range of 10-15%: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14... Finding the original filings in these cases, spanning 13 years at this point, took a fair bit of digging, but it was very eye-opening. See for example https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3... and Barcode:4426784-02 C-570-011 (not linkable by any URL). But, basically, you have to ask, if subsidies are the reason Chinese solar module prices today are lower than module prices were in 02012, when they cost €0.64 per peak watt instead of today's €0.110, does that mean that Chinese taxpayers are paying 82% of the cost of installing solar panels around the world? China is just exporting €100 billion a year of its tax revenues in the form of solar panels, with the intent of at some point raising the prices to above where they were in 02012, say €0.75 per peak watt? When should we expect that other shoe to drop? Because the solar panel industries in other nations are pretty thoroughly destroyed, except for those created by Chinese companies seeking ways around US tariffs. It just isn't a plausible story, even if it is being promoted by the same newspaper that promoted the story of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" to justify invading Iraq. |
The NYT article you linked talked about them using cheap(polluting) coal power and cheap(slave labor) mineral inputs.