WCA January 2013

From the americas

❖ Li Junfeng, a long-time director general for energy and climate policy at the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s top economic planning agency, places the blame elsewhere. In an interview with Mr Bradsher he said the domestic solar industry’s problems were the result of overcapacity in China, and not the fault of trade restrictions. The problem lies in the eagerness of Chinese businesses to rush into any new industry that looks attractive and swamp it with investments, Mr Li said. In his view, Chinese companies and their bankers are then far more reluctant than Western companies to admit defeat for investments that prove unprofitable. ❖ What can be said with certainty is that, until recently, Chinese policy makers were hailed by environmentalists around the world as visionaries. Now, given the glut of output from its solar power companies, China’s strategy of global dominance in ‘green’ technologies has apparently hit a wall. ❖ Even as solar panel makers in China trolled for customers, the US doubled down on its efforts to keep Chinese product out. Claiming that Chinese manufacturers and exporters have sold solar cells in the US at dumping margins ranging from 18.32 per cent to 249.96 per cent, the Commerce Department on 10 th October said it would impose countervailing duties against those imports in the range 14.78-15.97 per cent. That compares with the preliminary duties – ranging from 2.9 per cent to 4.73 per cent – announced in March. China’s state-run news agency Xinhua promptly quoted China’s Ministry of Commerce spokesman Shen Danyang as saying the US decision “signals protectionism” and “hinders the development of new energy.” In an editorial published 11 th October, Xinhua asserted that the Commerce Department’s decision will benefit neither the US nor China but would “escalate trade tensions between the two countries.” As the US pushes ahead on renewable energy, an ambitious solar power project starts up in California In mid-October, US Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced that the government had established a preliminary set of 17 solar energy zones in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The programme sets up a blueprint for utility-scale solar power projects in the west of the country. The department said as much as 23,700 megawatts of solar energy could be developed on the sites. On 25 th October it was announced that about 10 per cent of a 250mW solar power project in San Jose – 100 miles north of Los Angeles – had begun delivering electricity to the state’s electricity grid. NRG Energy and SunPower said the first 22mW of its California Valley Solar Ranch entered the grid from its site in San Luis Obispo County. Electricity from the project is contracted by state utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) for 25 years.

Polar satellites provide 84 per cent of the data used in the main American computer model tracking the course of an approaching hurricane. For years, as the accuracy of this kind of forecasting has steadily improved, the pm polar satellites maintained by NOAA have served a crucial function: “like the centre on a basketball team,” according to the Herald Tribune . But the suspension of this surveillance for a year or more – which some experts now view as almost certain to occur – looms. Wrote Mr Cushman, “All the while, despite many warnings, the gap in coverage has grown ever more likely.” Chinese solar panel makers, awash in product, implicate US and EU trade investigations in their ‘green glut’ “The result is a looming financial disaster, not only for manufacturers but for state-owned banks that financed factories with approximately $18 billion in low-rate loans and for municipal and provincial governments that provided loan guarantees and sold manufacturers valuable land at deeply discounted prices.” Writing from Beijing, Keith Bradsher of the New York Times might have been concluding a lecture on the perils of overreaching. China has quickly established itself as the world’s leader in renewable energy, forcing many foreign rivals out of business. But over the last five years of rapid growth in worldwide demand for solar panels and wind turbines, Chinese manufacturing capacity has grown even faster, creating enormous oversupply and an intensifying price war. Mr Bradsher, who is Hong Kong bureau chief for the Times , summarised the situation at the end of the summer. Solar panel prices having fallen by 75 per cent since 2008, China’s biggest panel makers were suffering losses of up to $1 for every $3 of sales to that point in 2012. Even as the cost of solar power has fallen, it remains triple the price of coal-generated power in China. This requires substantial subsidies through a tax imposed on industrial users of electricity to cover the higher cost of renewable energy. (“Glut of Solar Panels Poses a New Threat to China,” 4 th October) Chinese solar company executives blame their difficulties at least in part on the decision of the United States last spring to impose anti-dumping and anti-subsidy tariffs on solar panel imports, and on the European Union’s recent decision to start its own anti-dumping investigation of such imports from China. “It is not a Chinese industry problem, it is a global solar industry problem,” Rory Macpherson, a spokesman for Suntech Power, one of the largest Chinese solar panel manufacturers, told the Times . “It is primarily the result of an imbalance between supply and demand, and the US and EU trade investigations.” Renewable energy

42

Wire & Cable ASIA – January/February 2013

www.read-wca.com