Biden vetoes bipartisan Bill protecting US Solar Panel makers from Chinese competition.

When those tariffs went into effect, solar installations went down. Which hurt the local solar installers.

 

AND the overall renewable energy industry too.
It is much easier to whine and "buy" legislation that it is to actually compete more efficiently.

 

US Laws? Why not ... it works for fentanyl
.

 

Silfab is apparently still making decent panels in the USA and Canada. I haven't used one yet, but their prices (listed by my regular solar parts supplier) are pretty reasonable compared to the made-in-China brands.

If you want USA-produced panels, you can get them. And you won't pay much more for them comparatively speaking. It would have to be a very large installation for the delta to matter.

That tells me that this story is mostly noise and performative politicking. Plenty on both sides just itching to pick fights instead of getting work done.

 

Relations between these two countries have soured since the balloonathon. It is possible that Biden is looking for ways to improve that, which do not have large negative impacts on US economy.

I agree that intellectual property theft is a large problem, but with little or no overlap with photovoltaics.

 

"Due to its vast source of cheap labor and market manipulation, China was able to dominate the rare earth minerals market,"

Underlined the important part, and the opinion piece forgot about the laxer regulations.

 

There are some rare earth mining sites in Yunnan. Seen pictures but not visited. Not vast numbers of folks with shovels and photogenic conical hats. No, just big excavators and big trucks. Those machinery operators may not be very well paid by US standards but they are doing OK in China.

Otherwise they'd be digging holes in cities for underground parking structures under high-rise apt buildings. That's what most digger drivers do here.