America should welcome China's clean energy products, says Bloomberg columnist

NEW YORK -- David Fickling, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, argued on Wednesday that the United States should embrace affordable clean energy products, especially solar panels from China, rather than double tariffs.

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 said.

Chinese clean technology isn't "artificially cheap," a terminology used in Washington D.C., and it's just cheap, he said.

The result of capacity in excess of demand is a virtuous cycle of falling prices, innovation and industry consolidation while capacity that falls short of demand causes only inflation and shortages, said Fickling.

If Biden's promise of a carbon-free grid by 2035 is to have any chance of materializing, the United States needs to speed up its rates in connecting with wind and solar power farms at nearly 13 times of current rates and 3.5 times that in 2023, according to Fickling.

U.S. President Joe Biden is going to need all of the Chinese production lines if he is to meet the target of decarbonizing the U.S. electricity grid by 2035, Fickling said.

Globally, the building of solar and wind farms as well as relevant component factories are still not enough to make the energy switch work, he said.

The world is falling well short of the tripling in renewables that G20 leaders have committed to in last September and installations will roughly double, instead, according to a recent study by the International Energy Agency.