U.S. groups divided over tariffs on solar materials

Dec 21 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Lou Kilzer The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

A fight pitting Chinese solar panel makers and their American installers versus U.S.-based solar manufacturers flared on Tuesday after the head of a group favoring low-cost Chinese panels asked the manufacturers to withdraw trade complaints filed with the American government.

Jigar Shah, president of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy (CASE), asked Gordon Brinser, president of SolarWorld USA, in a letter to halt a complaint he and six other anonymous American manufacturers filed seeking tariffs against Chinese companies for allegedly "dumping" products into U.S. markets.

Shah said SolarWorld's actions could cause a trade war that would hurt American companies, which last year exported more solar products to China than China exported to the United States.

Brinser, in an e-mailed statement, said he and the other complainants "had no intention of withdrawing our petition."

While Shah's statement about American companies exporting more solar products to China was true in 2010, that will probably not hold up this year, Shayle Kann, managing director of the solar program at Boston-based GMT Research, told the Tribune-Review. In the past, the United States has exported silicon feedstock and silicon wafer manufacturing equipment to China.

Chinese companies would then use the feedstock and equipment to make finished panels to sell around the world. With the current glut of cheap panels, equipment sales are down this year and the Chinese are rapidly developing their own feedstock, Kann said.

In a 6-0 decision earlier this month, the International Trade Commission voted to allow the case to proceed. Both CASE and SolarWorld say American jobs are at stake depending on the final decision of the ITC and the Commerce Department.

SolarWorld, a German company with an American subsidiary that has fully integrated manufacturing operations in California, said something else is at risk down the line.

"We're all for free and open trade as long as it's legal," SolarWorld spokesman Ben Santarris said. But if highly subsidized products from China sold cheaply here eventually cripple American manufacturers, "there is potential that (Chinese companies) will wipe out the industry and then raise prices."

A Tribune Review investigation this year showed that's what Chinese rare earth producers have done over the last decade, selling cheap products until it was producing 97 percent of those products. Then in the last two years China curbed rare earth exports and prices skyrocketed.

However, Shah told Brinser that "the severe tariffs SolarWorld seeks would have a very damaging effect on the solar industry in the United States and would fundamentally undermine many years of effort by all of us who care about the future of solar power."

Thousands of American workers who design, install and provide equipment for solar panels would be harmed, Shah warned.

Among the 145 companies CARE said it represents are at least five major Chinese solar panel manufacturers.

Brinser's statement said SolarWorld and the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing, which has more than 150 associate members employing 11,000 U.S. workers in 14 states, viewed the CASE letter as "inappropriate bluster from Jigar Shah, who speaks on behalf of the Chinese manufacturers."