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U.S. Solar Has a $1.5 Billion, Long-Shot Plan to Objective a Trade War

While President Donald Trump prepares to announce his decision on new solar panel import tariffs, the U.S. industry is quietly trying to broker a sweeping deal to resolve a different trade dispute with China involving an estimated $1.5 billion held by Washington.

Since 2012, the U.S. has been collecting obligations on panels imported from China. American solar companies are pushing to divvy up that fund between manufacturers and suppliers in both the U.S. and China as part of a deal that, they say, could effectively reset solar-trade relations between the two nations.

The proposal, which trade experts describe as a long shot at best, would call for Trump to fell existing obligations on solar panel — and for the president to not levy new ones. China, in turn, would abandon its own tariffs on U.S. polysilicon, a key solar-panel ingredient. There would be many obstacles to constructing it all happen. Chief among them, of course, is convincing Trump to take a conciliatory stance with China. Yet solar companies say the deal would fit squarely into the president’s agenda.

” The authorities concerned has a real opportunity to succeed where others failed as a result of your commitment to a re-balancing of trade relations ,” Craig Cornelius, senior vice president of renewables at power generator NRG Energy Inc ., said at a hearing before Trump’s trade representative in December.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Emily Davis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative, declined to comment.

Deadline Looms

Trump has until Jan. 26 to decide whether to impose tariffs, stimulating it unlikely that any deal will be brokered in time to prevent new duties. Most U.S. solar companies resist tariffs, saying they will cripple the industry and kill tens of thousands of jobs. In the short-term, many are lobbying to maintains any duties as low as is practicable. Ultimately, they are pushing for a broad deal to end all solar trade barriers between the U.S ., China and other nations.

” We maintain our position that a global settlement, following the general construct proposed last month by NRG’s Craig Cornelius, would be a welcome outcome to these cases ,” Solar Energy Industries Association President Abigail Ross Hopper said in an emailed statement.

The push for the tariffs Trump is deeming began in April, when Suniva Inc ., a bankrupt, Georgia-based panel maker filed a trade objection arguing it had been crippled by a flood of imports. SolarWorld Americas, the U.S. unit of a bankrupt German producer, joined the instance the following month.

Read More: Trump Ruling Nears Amid Lobbying Frenzy on Solar Panel Tariffs

Suniva’s chief creditor is SQN Capital Management. The creditors of SolarWorld AG, the German company, include Centerbridge Partners LP.

The U.S. International Trade Commission voted in October to recommend tariffs of as much as 35 percent on imported panels. The chairman has the final say on the sizing, scope and duration of any responsibilities. They could affect panels imported from nearly every nation.

2012 Tariffs

The tariffs that the U.S. first enforcedin 2012 initially targeted Chinese panels and later were broadened to include those from Taiwan. The responsibilities came after SolarWorld Americas accused Chinese manufacturers of illegally selling panels at costs below the cost of production. China hit back in 2014 with tariffs on solar-grade polysilicon from the U.S.

Over the last five years, the U.S. is estimated to have collected more than $1.5 billion in responsibilities on imported panels, Cornelius said in his December testimony. James Rockas, a Commerce Department spokesman, declined to comment.

U.S. solar companies and others have softly pushed for years to use the money collected from the 2012 tariffs to broker a settlement to resolve the trade dispute with China.

” It was almost resolved it at the end of the Obama administration ,” said Jigar Shah, the co-founder of Generate Capital Inc. who was president of Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, a group that represented a wide swath of U.S. solar installers, developers and producers. The group disbanded in 2015.

Softwood Lumber

There is precedent for the idea. In 2006, the U.S. agreed to drop tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber and split the duties that had been collected between companies on both side of the border. Canadian loggers got about$ 4 billion, and about$ 1 billion went to U.S. companies and initiatives.

At the trade hearing last month, Cornelius proposed to split the solar duties that have been collected three ways between U.S. panel manufacturers and polysilicon producers and the Chinese companies that have been paying the tariffs. Instead of new duties, he called for enforcing a fee of 2 pennies per watt on imports.

” There is hope for a negotiated agreement ,” said Clark Packard, trade policy advise at the free-market think tank R Street Institute.” But there are two issues. One, you’re up against a pretty firm deadline. And two, it would probably necessitates bringing the U.S. and China back to the table to unwind these duties on solar products that cut both ways .”

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Billionaire Saudi Prince, Alwaleed bin Talal, Is Freed From Detention – New York Times

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Trump’s Solar Panel Tariff Decision Leaves Almost Everyone Unhappy – Forbes

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Paul Krugman: Trump is gladly wrecking the renewable-energy industry – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Solar Industry Braces For Job Losses As Trump Puts Fees On Imported Panels

For the past five years, the solar industry in the United States has boomed, becoming a dependable employment engine and dedicating is expected to be policymakers seeking to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

But late Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump approved importation fees that analysts say will send the price of solar panel surging and halting hiring in an industry that has grown 17 hours faster than the U.S. economy.

“It’s political fodder to build the United States look like it’s tough on China, and it’s protecting American jobs, ” Noah Ginsburg, a director at a New York-based nonprofit that helps low-income communities install solar panel, told HuffPost. “But the reality on the ground is deploying these tariffs will destroy American jobs and negatively impact anyone who wants to participate in and is beneficial for clean energy.”

Solar companies generated 1 in 50 new jobs in the U.S. in 2016, with the help of imported solar panel that drastically reduced costs.( The Solar Foundation projects that number will be even higher for 2017; the reporting on last year’s figures is due out in a few weeks .) Most of those chores are at companies that install solar panel on rooftops and build large solar farms for utilities and big corporations.

At the same time, domestic solar panel manufacturers have suffered, unable to compete with cheaper competitors from abroad. Last year, Suniva, a Georgia-based producer owned by a Chinese company, filed a trade grievance with the U.S. International Trade Commission( ITC) after proclaiming bankruptcy, arguing that it’s impossible to compete with inexpensive importations. In May, SolarWorld, the Oregon-based subsidiary of a German panel maker, joined the complaint. The companies requested that the White House impose fees on imported panels under the 1974 Trade Act that would more than doubled the price of solar cells from about 33 pennies to approximately 78 cents per watt.

Solar Foundation This chart — from the nonprofit Solar Foundation’s National Solar Jobs Census report last year — counted any chore that required 50 percent or more of a worker’s time to be devoted to solar energy.

Instead, Trump approved a 30 percent fee on all imported solar panel, lessening by 5 percent per year over four years. The decision is in line with what the ITC recommended in October, a proposal Suniva called “disappointing.”

About half of all solar equipment used in the U.S. this year is projected to come from overseas.

The fees are forecast to reduce solar installings by 10 percentage over five years, according to new computations by GTM Research, a renewable energy market data firm. The Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, said the tariffs would lead to 23,000 job losses this year alone in both the solar installation and manufacturing sectors.

“While tariffs in this case will not create adequate cell or module manufacturing to gratify U.S. demand, or maintain foreign-owned Suniva and SolarWorld afloat, they will create a crisis in a part of our economy that has been thriving, which was eventually expense tens of thousands of hard-working, blue-collar Americans their jobs, ” Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s chief executive, said in a scathing press release.

In a joint statement, Suniva and SolarWold “applauded” Trump, but advised him to increase the first-year tariff to 50 percent.

“Our companies and workers are grateful to hear the President understands the seriousness of the problem facing our solar manufacturers in Michigan, Georgia, Oregon and across the country, ” said the statement, signed by SolarWorld Americas Inc. CEO Juergen Stein and Suniva executive vice president Matt Card. “Now the President can save and rebuild this large American the enterprises and create thousands of jobs by immediately enforcing 50 percent tariffs — the strongest tariffs possible.”

Their complaint marked the first major trade case before the Trump administration, and offered a fascinating exam of the president’s “American First” patriot agenda, which has pushed fossil fuel production as its primary energy policy. The president, who has railed against renewable energy and dismissed climate change as a hoax, had significant discretion over Monday’s decision, which loomed over the industry for months.

The precise impact of the tariffs remains difficult to assess. Up to three-quarters of the solar projects scheduled for construction this year could be exempted, in part because companies already stockpiled imported equipment, Ethan Zindler, a Washington , D.C.-based analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, told HuffPost.

“But the 2019 construct could be a very different narrative, ” he said.

The tariffs appear targeted to Chinese solar equipment, but the wording of the announcement was unclear, building it difficult to gauge how it will affect importations from Southeast Asia and Mexico.

“It’s not great news for the industry, ” Zindler concluded. “But it surely could have been worse.”

The White House’s announcement came as a relief to cynics who expected the president to impose the sort of draconian tariffs Suniva and SolarWorld proposed.

It’s not great news for the industry. But it surely could have been worse. Ethan Zindler, Bloomberg New Energy Finance

That would have expensed the industry 88,000 jobs nationwide, about 34 percentage of the 260,000 Americans employed in solar in 2017, according to calculations released last June by SEIA. At risk would be 6,300 employment opportunities in Texas, 4,700 in North Carolina “and a whopping 7,000 in South Carolina, ” different groups said.

Utility-scale projects, which, because of different sizes, are more sensitive to hardware price fluctuations, would face the biggest slowdown. That leaves the Southeast, where utilities have commissioned a massive surge of solar projects since 2015, particularly vulnerable to higher tariffs.

“Those plants haven’t been built yet, they’re only planned, ” MJ Shiao, a solar analyst at GTM Research, told HuffPost ahead of Monday’s announcement. “The price of these plants won’t be able to pencil out, and they will be canceled.”

Wind energy developers could see a major benefit as countries seeking to increase renewable energy capability bolster incentives to construct new turbines in place of solar farms. Natural gas, already the primary ga of energy in the U.S ., would likely insure a boost, too. Coal, the country’s second-biggest source of energy, would be unlikely to see a major impact because its main challenger for the shares remains natural gas. Despite its recent gains, solar makes up merely a fraction of renewable energy’s 15 percentage share of U.S. electricity generation.

“More good-paying chores will be jeopardized by today’s decision than could possibly be saved by bailing out the bankrupt companies that petitioned for protection, ” said Clark Packard, trade policy counsel at the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank that advocates for climate change action. “Today’s decision also will threaten the environment by making clean energy sources less affordable.”

Robert Nickelsberg via Getty Images Employees from a Radian Generation’s operations and maintenance team change out a faulty solar inverter along a row of solar panel on Dec. 4, 2017, at the family-owned Knowlton Farm in Grafton, Massachusetts.

Solar installation companies warned that tariffs could cost manufacturing tasks, too, as an industry tide pulled by cheap importations recedes and lowers all ships. Still, despite its battles with cheap importations, the manufacturing sector saw a few bright spots before Trump decided to impose tariffs.

In June, Chinese-owned Seraphim Solar announced plans to double the workforce at its Jackson, Mississippi, module-making plant. In August, Tesla’s SolarCity division began producing solar cells at its new mill in Buffalo, New York. And trade disputes between countries have made manufacturing giants in Asia seem abroad for new options.

“There are spats between the European Union and China and India and China, ” Zindler said ahead of the proclamation. “A lot of Asian manufacturers are already looking to diversify where they are manufacturing.”

“But it takes a few years, ” he added. “So it’s not like immediately you’d have a inundate of factories in the U.S. owned by the Chinese. That won’t happen overnight.”

While Monday’s announcement marks the White House’s most significant blow to renewables yet, the Trump administration has consistently fought clean energy policies.

Last year, Trump proposed a 2018 budget that slashed funding for the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 71.9 percentage. The administration pushed a proposal designed by coal baron and Trump ally Bob Murray to bail out coal and nuclear power plants with a plan that would add $10.8 billion in ratepayer expenses. The Environmental Protection Agency moved to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the nation’s merely major federal program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and incentivize utility-scale clean energy investments.

The White House also illegally withheld $91 million in funding to ARP-AE, an experimental energy research program responsible for “holy grail” breakthroughs in battery storage technology.

“If Trump actually wants to put America first, he should reduce our reliance on polluting energy sources that fuel climate change, ” said Howard Crystal, a senior lawyer with the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. “Instead, this profoundly political move will build solar power more expensive for everyday Americans while propping up two failing, foreign-owned companies.”

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Brazil creates hopes of a retired from new mega-dam building

Hydropower policy to be rethought in face of environmental concerns, indigenous sensitivities and public unease, says surprise government statement

After swathes of forest clearance, millions of tonnes of concrete and decades of hydro-expansion, Brazil has raised hopes that it may finally step back from the construction of new mega-dams.

In a amaze statement, a senior government officer said hydropower policy needed to be rethought in the face of environmental concerns, indigenous sensitivities and public unease.

Anti-dam activists welcomed the apparent shifting, despite scepticism about the declared motives, which they believe mask a drying up of bribes from the construction industry. The decision could reprieve the Tapajos and free-flowing rivers from a plan to open half the Amazonbasin to hydro-development.

Brazil already gets more than 70% of its energy from hydropower- one of the largest proportion in the world. Until lately, most of the making capability received from plants near the southern border and the economic hubs of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.

But in recent years, the dam builders- backed by the Workers’ party administrations of Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva- pushed north into the Amazon with the huge Belo Monte project on the Xingu river, despite environmental concerns, court combats and fierce resistance from indigenous residents.

The Tapajos was the next major river in the sights of the consortium led by utility Eletrobras and major construction firms such as Odebrecht. Two dams have already been completed on the Teles Pires tributary and hundreds more were planned elsewhere.

But the momentum has decreased along with falling government revenues, sluggish economic demand and an increasingly unpredictable climate that has constructed hydropower generation less dependable and more expensive.

Opponents have capitalised on this. After indigenous demonstration and critical scientific studies, the environment agency rejected a licence application for a dam at Sao Luiz do Tapajos which would have flooded Munduruku indigenous territory.

The current centre-right government of Michel Temer now appears to be considering a far bigger retreat.

” We don’t hold preconceptions about big projects, but we have to respect the views of society, which has reservations about them ,” said Paulo Pedrosa, the executive secretary of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, in an interview with O Globo newspaper.

Government examines suggest Brazil could add 50 gigawatts of hydroenergy by 2050, but Pedrosa noted that less than a one-quarter of the necessary dams would be free from challenges over protected land.

Pedrosa said such costs should not be conceal, an apparent reference to the Rousseff administration’s refusal to heed warnings about the Belo Monte dam, which has since demonstrated a social and environmental disaster.

The Car Wash corruption investigation exposed how the Workers’ party received campaign gifts from Odebrecht in exchange for over-inflated contracts to build Belo Monte and other infrastructure projects.

Now the bribes have dried up, government officials have little incentive to cover up the social and environmental costs of future projects.

Few believe the Temer administration is any cleaner or greener. It is closely allied to the agribusiness lobby, which is primarily responsible for Amazon clearance. Last year, the government also attempted to open up protected areas to mining companies.

But it is in the process of privisatising Eletrobras, which will mean the economic feasibility of mega-projects will come under greater scrutiny, particularly with gust and solar energy becoming more viable.

The government will propose a new model for project evaluation to Congress this year that takes greater account of costs.

” Current projects when priced appropriately – including transmission costs, hazards associated with the seasonality of energy and the possible lag of works – show them to be much less competitive than in previous evaluations ,” the Ministry of Mines and Energy noted in an email response to The Guardian .

It is unlikely to be a complete panacea Given the pro-business posture of the ruling coalition, there are fears that other environmental licensing criteria may be weakened.

With a general elections in October, any changes of policy could also be rapidly reversed, but anti-dam activists hold out hope this – in regard to mega-projects at least – this will be a turning point.

” The Brazilian government’s announcement validates what scientists, indigenous activists and economists have long known: that these costly, corrupted hydropower projects are destroying lives, livelihoods and the vibrant ecosystem of the Amazon, the lungs of countries around the world ,” Kate Horner, executive director of International Rivers, said.” Brazil can meet its energy requires without mega-dams, and now it will eventually get the chance .”