Phred Dvorak of The Wall Street Journal reports that Joe Biden is trying to balance building clean-energy industries and curbing Chinese imports such as batteries and solar-panel parts. The trade restrictions are threatening America’s push for greener energy. Dvorak writes:
The Biden administration is hoisting barriers to Chinese clean-energy imports to protect domestic industries as the presidential election nears. But the trade restrictions also threaten another of Biden’s priorities: building out renewable-energy generation.
This month, the administration allowed a set of duties aimed at China-based manufacturers of solar panels to take effect—after having put the measures on hold two years ago. The International Trade Commission, a federal agency that analyzes trade issues, also gave its initial go-ahead to an antidumping petition that some U.S. solar manufacturers have backed. In the next few weeks, the administration is expected to close a tariff loophole that let companies bring in many solar panels duty-free.
Those moves, along with others that raise tariffs on green products such as batteries and electric vehicles, represent some of the strongest attempts yet to protect nascent industries from a glut of green Chinese products and wean the U.S. off clean-energy supply chains that Beijing dominates. […]
The uncertainty from the antidumping petition and other trade actions “just slows down projects and…puts developers in a tough position with their customers,” he said. “And it does not help with achieving the deployment objectives that any of the individual companies or the industry writ large—and I think the Biden administration—have here.”
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