The China Photovoltaic Industry Association recently highlighted serious concerns and strong opposition over the US distorting the global solar market by providing excessive subsidies to US companies and imposing high tariffs on imported solar products, hampering international cooperation to battle the looming issue of climate change. In a recent statement, the trade body said that the US has built high walls of protectionism by imposing multiple trade restrictions and continuously increasing tariff barriers on imported photovoltaic products. Such an example is that the country decided in May that the import tax on Chinese solar cells would rise from 25 percent to 50 percent. The association also pointed out that the US implemented exclusive and discriminatory industrial policies through legislation such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), and subsidized its own PV industry on a large scale. “The Inflation Reduction Act, introduced in 2022, offers subsidies of an unprecedented $369 billion to support investments and production in the clean energy sector, including domestic PV products, aiming to reconstruct the PV industry chain…On May 16, 2024, the Department of Energy announced a $71 million investment, including $16 million from the IIJA, to fund the Silicon Solar Manufacturing and Dual-Use Photovoltaics Incubator program ($27 million) and the Advancing US Thin-Film Solar Photovoltaics funding program ($44 million), aiming to close gaps in PV supply chain manufacturing capabilities,” it wrote. It said such moves violated the multilateral trade rules and severely distorted the market operations of the global supply chain of the PV industry. Experts and business leaders noted that while subsidies are common in the new energy industry globally, the US strategy of raising external tariffs under the name of anti-subsidy and financially backing local firms is double standard, with an aim to hinder Chinese […]
Click here to view original web page at www.chinadaily.com.cn