China Kicking America’s Ass in Race to Go Solar
Leave it to China to find a way to produce just about anything on the cheap, and do it really quickly. Despite the Obama administration’s dedication to getting America’s clean energy industry off the ground, China is leaving us in the dust and it’s looking unlikely that we’ll get a good chance to catch up.
In fact, the Chinese are preparing to build plants right here in the United States to assemble their products, to get around protectionist legislation.
From The New York Times:
The Obama administration is determined to help the American industry. The energy and Treasury departments announced this month that they would give $2.3 billion in tax credits to clean energy equipment manufacturers. But even in the solar industry, many worry that Western companies may have fragile prospects when competing with Chinese companies that have cheap loans, electricity and labor, paying recent college graduates in engineering $7,000 a year.
“I don’t see Europe or the United States becoming major producers of solar products — they’ll be consumers,” said Thomas M. Zarrella, the chief executive of GT Solar International, a company in Merrimack, N.H., that sells specialized factory equipment to solar panel makers around the world.
China’s commitment to solar energy isn’t likely to make a big dent in the fight against global warming, especially given the country’s own skyrocketing emissions, much of which are caused by the pollution that goes hand-in-hand with running ultra-low-cost factories.
America still has the world’s largest supplier of photovoltaic cells – First Solar in Tempe, Arizona – but China’s Suntech is not far behind. Suntech plans to build a solar panel assembly plant in the United States “to facilitate sales — ‘buy American’ and things like that”, according to the company’s president for global sales and marketing.
Link The New York Times
Photo credit: OregonDOT
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Consciousness, Green Living, Health, Science, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
