Concerns aired over tariffs on Chinese solar products

Instead of doubling tariffs on Chinese solar products, the United States should embrace their affordability, an industry expert says.

David Fickling, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion who covers climate change and clean energy, wrote on Wednesday that the US is still not building enough solar and wind farms, or enough factories for the components, to make the switch work.

"Yet President Joe Biden's justification for doubling tariffs on imported solar to 50 percent is that, to the contrary, the world has too many production lines for green tech," he wrote.

In the article, Fickling noted that Chinese industrial policy caused the price of solar panels to fall from about 90 cents per watt in early 2012 to just over 10 cents per watt now.

"We should welcome that. Reducing the cost of green power is the single best thing the world can do if we're to escape catastrophic warming in our lifetimes," Fickling wrote.

Biden contended last month that the low cost of China's solar panels is a result of "policy-driven overcapacity" in manufacturing, "flooding global markets with artificially cheap solar modules and panels".

The White House announced on May 14 that tariffs on solar cells and modules will increase from 25 percent to 50 percent this year.

In an appearance on Bloomberg's The China Show on Thursday, Fickling said: "We're (the US is) still well below the capacity we need.

"The amount of renewables waiting to get connected to the US grid is greater than the amount of generating capacity on the US grid as a whole at the moment. So there are these huge bottlenecks," he said, adding that "a lot" of it has to do with permitting and grid access, and some of it has to do with finance.

'Playing catch-up'

"You can't ignore the tariffs issue. It's clearly something that's not going to change. It's an election-year issue. It's not going to change imminently."

Fickling said the US has installed about one-tenth of the renewable power that China has installed.

Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Yahoo Finance that the US is now playing catch-up on a technology that has really matured in China, and it is going to be very difficult to recreate those supply chains in a short period at a low cost.

Agencies contributed to this story.