TECH
19
FORTUNE.COM // JULY 2019
THE DILEMMA OF
‘GREEN CHINA INC.’
U.S. businesses can profit from China’s clean-energy boom—
if trade tensions don’t disrupt their flow. By Jeffrey Ball
SO MUCH FOR CL AIMS THAT THE U.S.-CHINA trade war is boosting
American jobs. REC Silicon, a Norwegian firm that produces
polysilicon at its plant in Moses Lake, Wash., announced in May
that it planned to mothball the facility this summer “unless access
to Chinese polysilicon markets is restored.”
REC has postponed a final decision, on the
chance that a truce might emerge. But the
facility’s uncertain future hints at a broad,
troubling trend. Polysilicon is a key raw mate-
rial used to make solar panels; China is its top
global consumer. Indeed, China, which has
decreed green industries to be a strategic prior-
ity, has become the world’s largest producer of
clean-energy equipment and of clean energy
itself. The U.S. has shown less sustained inter-
est in those arenas—but plenty of interest in
quashing the Chinese green giant.
That approach is hurting not just the planet
but also America’s bottom line. The trans-
pacific tariff war is nowhere as intense as in
the clean-energy sector, where it is backfiring
and harming U.S. companies. Anti-China fever
ENERGY
UNDAMPENED
A solar-power
station built
atop a lobster
fisher y in
Huzhou, China.
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