Golden sun, green economy: market security and the US/EU-China ‘solar trade war’

Abstract

China's solar manufacturing and R&D industry has developed rapidly since 2000: by 2010, 40% of the world's solar panels were manufactured in China. This has occurred as a result of strategic government economic planning, which has included concerns about energy security, energy diversity, and about the stimulation of a renewables-based green economy. The growth of China's solar industry has been marked since 2011 by what has come to be termed a “Solar Trade War” between the EU, the USA and China. The paper analyzes the heterogeneous framing of China's solar energy industry by corporate, nongovernmental and government actors in the USA and European Union. In so doing, the paper aims to critically investigate the production of specific market knowledge(s) that are not only instrumental and rational, but based on often-contradictory discursive constructions of an apparently merely technological and economic phenomenon such as the production of solar modules.

Keywords:

• China
• solar power
• green economy
• sustainability
• transition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Federico Caprotti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5280-1016

Notes

1. The paper describes China's solar energy strategy as a key plank of its energy security strategy, while remaining aware of the key concerns over energy resilience (in terms of reliability of supply, and grid instability) which renewables pose.

2. Crude oil and natural gas generated 9.8% and 4.3%, respectively (Wang and Chen 2010).

3. In the context of the State Council's announcement, ‘new energies’ include nuclear power, clean coal and natural gas.

4. In comparison, the second largest realizable PV potential for 2020 was assessed, in 2008, to be the EU, with 92.2 TWh realizable potential, and the USA, with a potential for 68.4 TWh (IEA 2008).

5. However, the 2011 installed capacity represented a doubling of the installed solar capacity in China in 2009 (Cheung 2011).

6. The Golden Roofs program was part of the MLTDPRE's Building-Integrated Photovoltaics strategy.

7. The loans made by the China Development Bank to the solar industry in China were cited as a cause of Solyndra's collapse both by the Executive Director of the Loans Programs Office, and by the US Secretary of Energy, in comments before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2011 (Neilson 2012).

8. In 2007–2011, however, the year with the highest EU solar cell production was 2010, with 3120 MW produced (Bai et al. 2012).