No cheap solar power for you

Who's your daddy?  

Capitalism, freedom and the American Dream are being destroyed by special interests.  If citizen-consumers are not free to choose what to buy and use to improve their own lives, how free are theY really?  When government steps in to favor one company (crony capitalism) in the marketplace, the impact to the rest of us is a limit on what we can do with our lives.

Our choices are being limited to a select few government-approved companies and goods rather than allowing a plethora of products and ideas to compete for our approval. In the marketplace. If choices are artificially curtailed this time, what else might have come to market that was, is and will be discouraged by government favoritism, and how will you know what you have lost?

Any voting that takes place on what products and ideas should survive, ought to be done by citizen-consumers who do the voting with their own hard-earned property (money).

O say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave,

O're the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

WSJ. September 13, 2017. By The Editorial Board
Solar Power Death Wish
Subsidies aren’t enough. Now solar-panel makers want tariffs.

Bil­lions of dol­lars in tax-payer sub­si­dies haven’t made the U.S. so­lar in­dustry com­pet­i­tive, and now two com­pa­nies want to make it even less so. Suniva Inc., a bank­rupt so­lar-panel maker, and Ger­man-owned So­lar­World Amer­i-cas have pe­ti­tioned the U.S. In­ternational Trade Com­mis­sion (ITC) to impose tar­iffs on for­eign-made crys­talline sil­i­con pho­to­voltaic cells.

So­lar cells in the U.S. sell for around 27 cents a watt. The pe­ti­tion­ers want to add a new duty of 40 cents a watt. They also want a floor price for im­ported pan­els of 78 cents a watt ver­sus the mar­ket price of 37 cents. In other words, they want the gov­ern­ment to dou­ble the cost of the main com­ponent used in the U.S. so­lar in­dus­try. So­lar elec­tric­ity prices could rise by some 30% if the ITC says they’ve been in­jured by for­eign com­pe­ti­tion—a de­ci­sion is due by Sept. 22—and the Trump Ad­min­is­tra­tion goes along with the tar­iff re­quest.

U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ers won coun­ter­vail­ing and an-tidump­ing du­ties against im­ports from China and Taiwan in 2012 and in 2015. But now they’re re­sort­ing to Sec­tion 201 of the Trade Act of 1974 be­cause they don’t need to show they are vic­tims of dump­ing or for­eign gov­ern­ment sub­sidies. They only need to show that im­ports have harmed them.

The harm is real but that’s due to changes in the mar­ket­place. The U.S. so­lar in­dus­try has dis­covered that its com­par­a­tive ad­van­tage lies not in mak­ing pan­els, a ba­sic prod­uct, but in adding value to imported cells and mod­ules. This involves mak­ing and installing rack­ing or framing sys­tems and incor­porat­ing in­no­va­tions like track­ers that ori­ent to­ward the sun.

To turn sun­shine into en­ergy re­quires in­vert­ers that trans­late the en­ergy cap­tured on a so­lar panel into some­thing that can be sent on the elec­tri­cal grid. While there are fewer than 1,000 jobs in U.S. panel man­u­fac­turing, some 260,000 jobs rely on ac­cess to imported pan­els.

Higher prices for pan­els will also hurt util­i­ties that have in­vested in re­new­able fu­els. In an Au­gust 21 let­ter to the ITC, Di­ane Den­ton of Duke En­ergy wrote that over the last five years Duke has in­vested heav­ily in so­lar and has plans for more. But Duke needs “ac­cess to so­lar CSPV mod­ules at glob­ally-compet­i­tive prices” so it can “pro­vide cost-com­pet­i­tive so­lar power to our customers,” Ms. Den­ton wrote.

The ITC hasn’t in­ves­tigated a 201 trade case since the Bush Ad­min­is­tra­tion slapped a 30% tar­iff on steel im­ports in 2002. That fi­asco cost an es­ti­mated 200,000 jobs in U.S. steel-con­sum­ing in­dus­tries be­fore the Ad­min­is­tra­tion dropped the tar­iffs 18 months later.

So­lar tar­iffs would be an­other de­struc­tive ex­ercise that ben­e­fits a hand­ful of Suniva and So­lar­World in­vestors at the ex­pense of every­one else—in­clud­ing the rest of the so­lar in­dustry. This is protectionism at its worst.