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Solar Panel Trade War Heats Up
Hugh Pickens writes "Reuters reports that Chinese solar companies could soon find themselves bereft of some of their biggest foreign markets as Western manufacturers intensify a solar trade war and seek stiff anti-dumping duties on low-cost Chinese products. German group SolarWorld says it is working on steps to curb alleged price dumping by Chinese rivals in Europe as a group of seven U.S. solar companies urges the U.S. government to slap anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made solar energy products. Western solar companies have been at odds with their Chinese counterparts for years, alleging they receive lavish credit lines to offer modules at cheaper prices. 'American solar operations should be rapidly expanding to keep pace with the skyrocketing demand for these products,' says Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon whose office authored a whitepaper called 'China's Grab for Green Jobs.' (PDF) 'But that is not what has been happening. There seems to be one primary explanation for this; that is, that China is cheating.'"
And China was cheating no doubt with making cheap Reeboks and Nike's and stuff for US multinationals... Oh yeah, sorry, forgot. Those were US owned Multinationals getting all the profit then.
I guess the difference between dumping and competing is whether you're ripping off the consumer and greedy multinational corporations are soaking up all those tax-free dollars or not.
We are all producers and consumers. As producers we want our products to be rare and expensive. As consumers we want our products to be plentiful and cheap. You have to decide what type of world you want to live in. One that has plenty of inexpensive things or a few expensive things. I'll take cheap and plentiful.
Let's say the Chinese decided that the US was too dependent on foreign oil and as a buddy they wanted to supply us with free solar panels. As much as they could make. Would this be a good thing or bad thing? For consumers it would be great but for producers of solar panels it would be terrible. To have progress as a society you have to let consumers rule.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
The US government gave, what $500 million dollars to Solyndra to produce solar panels.
why is it different when the Chinese government subsidises solar panel companies?
How does "cheating" occur? Can somebody explain to me what "cheating" means in this context?
There is no free market, don't be confused by thinking about it. Its simply not relevant.
The Chinese government hands cash to their panel manufacturers to lower their prices so they can put our manufacturers out of business. Then they have two options, they can go the "home appliance route" and make money bu cutting quality so we have to replace our panels every two years, just like Chinese dish washing machines. We'll buy replacements for our broken panels a couple times because it must just be bad luck that they fall apart in 2 years instead of 20, but eventually give up. The other option is explode prices upward, because the capital cost of setting up a competitor is very high and takes a long time, and our government will not help our manufacturers in fact it will stand in the way whenever possible, and finally if we built a plant to sell cheap panels the Chinese govt would merely repeat the same trick, hand cash to their manufacturers to undercut the prices of our new plant, and put our new plant out of business, at which time they can charge whatever they want again.
The USA problem is we think we are human beings and Chinese are not human beings they are just the yellow hordes or whatever subhuman description you'd like. We do not allow panels to be sold here if they were made in the US and toxic waste was dumped into USA drinking water, USA rivers, USA farm fields, etc, because we are civilized humans (mostly) and humans should not have to live in a toxic dump. But the Chinese are not humans, so if we buy panels from people who dump toxic waste into the environment, that is OK with us, because they are just animals. Turns out that proper waste disposal is so expensive that its an economic non-starter to buy American instead of cheap Chinese. I'm not saying I agree with any of it, I'm just clarifying that the only reason we allow it is the US is a profoundly racist country.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It's not entirely about the environmental regulations. In addition to toxic waste spewing all over their country, Chinese workers don't have the kind of labor protections that European and even US workers currently have, like protection from unpaid overtime, workplace safety laws so they don't get killed on the job, minimum wages, collective bargaining rights, child labor laws, etc.
I am officially gone from
This is basically what is going on and not just in solar cells but also in rare earth minerals. Similar problem. Low concentrations demand leaching with rather aggressive and toxic chemicals, that are expensive to capture and recycle. Importing them from China in the name of Free Markets has no different result as producing them in the USA and dumping the waste on China.
The whole "buy Chinese stuff and blame them for their CO2 emissions" business is yet another example.
Cheating:
- Governmental currency manipulation which is pretty much a certainty.
- "Product Dumping", e.g. selling a product at below production cost (either by simply eating the loss or cutting corners and dumping an inferior, unsafe product) so as to drive competitors out of the market and then price-gouge once you're the only supplier (already seen in some markets where China did, in fact, run US companies out of business)
- Rampant theft of intellectual property - we're not just talking Napster-grade "file sharing" here, we are talking about rampant spying and thievery of patented products and designs. As the last article I link shows, it's not just the US getting burned by the Chinese - this is a major point of concern in the EU as well.
Are you getting some form of a clue now?
And are only just starting after 40 years to wake up to the fact that the enemy is over here not there, and usually has the title "leader".
Example:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cid=N00009638
Guess that 1 million has been paid back several hundred thousand times.
Deleted
1. Outsource 90% of manufacturing to China
2. Start a trade war with China
3. ???
4. Profit?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If they are excessive... How come Germany and the rest of Norther Europe is doing so damn well?
One of the secrets is the universal health care and other social programs, which in fact reduce the overall cost of employment in society by making employees more efficient and cutting out parasites like health insurance companies. (Healthcare cost is 6-8% versus 17% in the US, and there's no 'insurance' companies taking 30% cut in pure profits out of healthcare spending)
Not really - I mean what does America produce that China needs? This is not a trade war as much as trade suicide.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Environmental regulation is a favorite whipping boy of the "pro-business" crowd; but how can slashing restrictions on my ability to impose externalities by chemical means(some irksome, some lethal) on you in the pursuit of profit possibly be justified either ethically or from a 'sanctity of private property' stance?
Other than being done by respectable guys in suits, rather than unlikeable scum, polluting for profit is the approximate ethical and economic equivalent of picking pockets for profit: somebody ends up with a tidy black balance sheet to show for it; but they leave a whole lot of people in the red, without even the pretense of their consent.
It's their bafflingly unwavering support for such policies that makes me suspect most "libertarians" of being nothing more than corporatist shills. Step one to defending "Life, Liberty, and Property" is not, in fact, giving others the right to emit whatever exotic nasties they find profitable to dispose of into your body and/or property...
I thought "the invisible hand of the market" was supposed to make things work.
Except it's well known (at least among economists) that markets do not in fact work correctly all the time. If I start a landfill on my property, that presents an economic cost to my neighbors even though my neighbors weren't part of the deal. Or if the point of buying the product is to show off how rich I am, then instead of lower prices yielding more sales, higher prices yield more sales. Or if my factory emits lots of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, and your kid catches asthma because of it, that's a cost paid by you even though it was caused by me. Or if I go to buy a used car, while I can evaluate the car somewhat carefully, ultimately the dealer knows more about the history of that car than I do, so it's possible that he'll sell me a piece of junk. Or if there's an IPO of a very hyped but fundamentally worthless company, lots of investors will buy it up early, wait for the price to skyrocket, and try to find some bigger sucker to sell to before anyone realizes how worthless the company is.
Point is, things are a lot more complicated than you were probably taught in high school.
I am officially gone from
Unlike the maze of bullshit that is the US financial system, the Chinese appear to be engaging in actual beneficial capitalism. Instead of subsidizing banks and petro-warfare, their government subsidizes the manufacture of distributed, individual-scale, liberating technologies that are mostly produced for export, benefiting consumers in the US and around the world. Look at what the Chinese produce: affordable solar energy, small-scale agricultural equipment, bicycles. Compare that to what the US produces: large-scale strip-mining equipment, large-scale industrial-farming equipment, gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. When US consumers inevitably use imported individual-scale technologies to escape our own system of corporate-dominated, crony-capitalist citizenship-slavery, the banks and corporations at the center of the US control grid lose their grip and send an army of lobbyists to DC in order to draft favorable legislation and bail-outs in an attempt to maintain their coercive, dominant position.
And I'm not just being hyperbolic. The American consumer needs to wake up and realize that it is literally a control grid, maintained through government-sanctioned force and fraud. Banks and the FED, through derivative contracts and control of the mortgage and municipal bond markets, use a maze of 600 trillion dollars worth of fraudulent debt to herd Americans into city/slums where they can be fleeced of all capital and resources by coercive corporate monopolies maintained through regulatory arbitrage. From there, it's into permanent wage-slavery, prisons or the military where economic dependence is used as the excuse to liquidate human and civil rights. Corporations, banks and bureaucrats profit every step of the way.
This is the reason we see, for example in the Senate's proposed currency tariff bill, instead of flat-rate, across-the-board tariffs that address actual currency manipulation while respecting free trade, targeted tariffs designed to protect individual companies proportional to their ability to fleece American consumers. The current design of tariffs according to the US ruling elite, instead of protecting Americans from unfair trade as intended, is to protect US corporations by leading American consumers to slaughter either in the figurative economic sense or, when that fails, in the literal "perpetrating false-flag terror and sending them to die in some fraudulent war" sense.
Frankly the Chinese should complain that our trillion-dollar subsidies of petro-warfare is hurting sales of their solar panels.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The Chinese government hands cash to their panel manufacturers
Right. Let me stop you there because you have no idea what you are talking about. The majority of funding in China is through the CDB loan financing. Now explain please, how Chinese CDB loan guarantees any different than US DOE guarantees (e.g. Solandra, First Solar, SunPower) except the magnitude? They aren't different. Not to mention that about 90% of CDB loan guarantees have not been used yet because they are explicitly for projects financing (e.g capital for PV parks), an area where Chinese PV firms are still way behind their western counterparts.
Chinese firms have primarily expanded using private money based on share offerings in the U.S. markets, secondary offerings, and bond offerings and the US and Chinese markets. The Chinese have spent billions in private financing over the past 4-6 yr. increasing output, The newest Chinese facilities are driving down prices
Chinese got into PV with newer and cheaper (American and German) equipment and they have more recent land & tax deals with local governments (e.g. Evergreen solar, First Solar) . That's it. U.S. firms are crying because a third of Chinese capacity of c-Si PV can run a profit at an unsubsidized price of 1.00 $/pW. There are plenty of Chinese whining too. Guess what is happening to the whiners? They are done. Some are dumping inventory on their way out the door, depressing prices slightly more in the short run. Out-competed. Destructive capitalism. Much like the entire fraudulent U.S economy.
This ridiculous argument about quality is always the losers last appeal. Chinese Tier 1 produces can match any western mfging quality. Highest quality poly panels are sourced entirely from Chinese/Taiwanese owned Taiwanese polysilicon and mainland Chinese wafer, cell, and module production. Two prominent firms I can think of have recently stepped up to the plate with 20 & 25 yr power output warranties. Several of the Tier 2 produces can probably boast ever high quality, they just lack the reputation. . yet. Why don't you explain how their quality will be inferior after recruiting the most experienced engineers, buying the newest equipment, and contracting with the best western process and construction companies. What's left inferior nature of the Chinese people/culture?
The US has lost solar and Germany is too small to keep up. Fair and square in an utterly ruthless and brutal capitalistic process. The Chinese will feel the pain too, many of them are finished and a very stressful period of consolidation and bankruptcy will soon begin. Things will stabilize and cSi PV will become a globally traded every conversion commodity that is cheaper than everything except 160MW ICC gas turbines at 2009 natural gas prices. It's already done. Let's just hope CDB doesn't just spend a few billion and buy global PV capacity for the Chinese government. I would if I were them.
On May 2nd, 1933, the day after Labor day, Nazi groups occupied union halls and labor leaders were arrested. Trade Unions were outlawed by Adolf Hitler, while collective bargaining and the right to strike was abolished.
Lenin, at the behest of Stalin and Trotsky, banned trade unions in favor of "total government union." Stalin followed this up by increasingly draconian laws that docked a worker 25% of a day's pay for being a mere 20 minutes late to work, and imposed prison sentences for anyone who attempted to quit their assigned job.
Chairman Mao eliminated trade unions, in a move very reminiscent of Stalin. More recently, China created the "All China Federation of Trade Unions", a front organization whose primary purpose is to serve as an enforcement arm of the Chinese Communist Party. No actual trade unions or labor bargaining are allowed to exist.
In 2011, in multiple states in the US, the Republican Party... abolished unions.
The thing you are missing is all things are relative. Pollution may be bad but compared to what? Dangerous factories may be bad but compared to what?
When an economy is purely agricultural it is very dangerous. There are plenty of things for farmers to die from and the working conditions are outside in all weather. Compared to that a sweatshop is much nicer. You have a roof and a stool. And if you are lucky the product needs to be build in a climate controlled factory and you get to enjoy that too.
Same for pollution. When you living a subsistence life you would trade some pollution for an easier life. This is a necessarily state to pass through because you can't afford both the manufacturing capital and the environmental protection capital costs. It is only when you grow to a certain productive level can you afford safety and pollution controls. You are looking at it from a rich western lifestyle. Try to see it through the eyes of someone that is seriously worried about where their next meal is coming from. Even the poor in the US are fat.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Well stated. Wish I had the modpoints, I'd give you one.
Hey, keep your damn logic out of this, universal health care and social programs will turn any country into the USSR and you know it!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
> what does America produce that China needs?
Needs or wants?
For example, America produces wheat at a much lower cost than China. But China has explicit policies in place to raise the domestic price of wheat to the point where consumers don't buy more of it than they can produce domestically. This sort of sucks for Chinese consumers, obviously, but who cares if people are getting enough food....
More to the point of your question, what America has that China needs right this second is consumers. A trade war does mean higher prices on manufactures goods for US consumers; it also means higher unemployment in China. And higher unemployment and the ensuing political instability is something the Chinese government desperately doesn't want. This is why they've been doing everything they can to export their unemployment to the rest of the world (which is what their currency operations and general economic policy is all about). This does involve repressing domestic demand, unfortunately, which leaves them even more dependent on exports and foreign demand to keep people employed...
So far the US has been allowing higher unemployment here in exchange for cheaper products. This works so long as the unemployment rate doesn't get too high so people vote more for cheap stuff than for more jobs. Whether we've gotten to "too high" yet is unclear.
In 2011, in multiple states in the US, the Republican Party... abolished unions.
Wrong.
Unions for government workers had many of their bargaining rights restricted or eliminated. Not private sector Unions.
Public sector (government employee) Unions are an abomination. Their purpose is not to share in profits, as government makes no profits. It's to grab all the tax money they can and influence lawmakers to pass laws to increase their power.
The government employee Unions "negotiate" for higher wages & benefits, paid for by taxpayers, not the profits of a private business, with one political Party (who don't themselves feel the pain of a bad deal for the taxpayers), and then the Union takes money from Union members as Union dues and contributes a large portion right back to the election campaigns and PACs of that same Party.
It's an incestuous and corrupt system that robs taxpayers blind and funnels money into one political Party's coffers, while ensuring lawmakers pass laws favorable to increasing the Union's power and wealth.
Even FDR said public sector unions were bad. The founders of the labor movement viewed unions as a vehicle to get workers more of the profits they help create. Government workers, however, don't generate profits. They merely negotiate for more tax money. When government unions strike, they strike against taxpayers. F.D.R. considered this "unthinkable and intolerable."
Government collective bargaining means voters do not have the final say on public policy. Instead, their elected representatives must negotiate spending and policy decisions with unions. That is not exactly democratic...a fact that unions once recognized.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
What, did some teacher run over your dog on the way to a union meeting when you were five?
People like you are the reason we have unions in the first place. Unneeded in the public sector? Because postal workers should roll over and accept 100,000+ in job cuts to cover a fiscal hole created by Congress, when they mandated that the Post Office fully fund pensions for the next 75 years - meaning people who haven't even been born yet? PATCO - one of their main goals of the strike was to get a shorter work week to maintain the intense levels of concentration needed to keep planes from flying into eachother.
Instead, Reagan fired all the traffic controllers, and now you have them dozing off on their shifts because they might only have a couple hours off between shifts.
As opposed to your citation-free numbers?
"Public sector (government employee) Unions are an abomination."
And in the words of Steve Jobs:
"what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way. This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."
"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good? Not really great ones, because if you're really smart, you go, 'I can't win.' "