Dead in a few months: China wipes out EU’s solar industry

CAN EU SAVE THE SOLAR PANELS?

GREEN TRANSITION VS. CRITICAL DEPENDENCY: Make no mistake, this is one of the most consequential dilemmas facing the European Union. Does it want to be green or strategic, if being green and strategic is not an option?

As much as the European Union needs to turn itself carbon-free, it’s increasingly dependent on imports from China, which it labels as an economic competitor and, worse, systemic rival. POLITICO has the story.

By earmarking billions of euros to speed up installation of solar panels across Europe, it’s building up an overwhelming reliance on Chinese products — including those from the region of Xinjiang which is the focus of human rights abuses, as documented by the U.N.

Such a business model is also killing Europe’s last few enterprises that specialize in making solar power panels, going against what France and others hope to be a period of European reindustrialization.

How bad is the solar situation? Very. The EU industry warns that it has only weeks left before the sector implodes. 

“The situation is really, really, really troublesome,” Johan Lindahl, secretary general of the European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC), which represents local producers, told my colleague Victor Jack.

Quote du jour: “We might lose a majority of the European industry in the next couple of months if there’s no strong political signal,” Lindahl said.

Lukewarm response from Eurocrats: The European Commission has begun early-stage talks to discuss options for helping producers — but it made no concrete commitments during a hotly-anticipated debate in the European Parliament on Monday that many in the industry hoped would show the bloc was taking the issue seriously.

‘Work closely’ blah blah blah: Low prices are “clearly a challenge to EU solar panel producers,” the European Commission’s financial services chief Mairead McGuinness told European lawmakers during a session in Strasbourg.

She added the EU executive would “work closely with the EU industry to deploy every effort at technical and political level” to help manufacturers. Doesn’t sound like a great deal.

Read the full story here.