There’s a dirty little secret about those Chinese-made solar panels that are popping up everywhere.
It wasn’t supposed to work this way.
When a significant new solar project starts up somewhere in the country, the rationale for it generally checks the following two boxes: state mandates require that a certain percentage of power must be provided by renewables, and scads of government money is available to solar panel sellers and installers to help convince consumers and utilities to take the plunge.
The result is that thousands of rural acres that used to host heaps of corn, wheat, and other commodities now sport rows of shiny solar panels in an effort to pass muster with these mandates and take advantage of the taxpayer funding.
On the other side, though, there’s a dark secret being hidden from most Americans. Perhaps they know that most of the raw materials for making solar panels are sourced from China and are often shipped ready for use. But The New York Times last week featured a story about the troubling origins of this “green” energy staple, and the report should give the industry and its supporters pause. Simply put, as David Strom notes at Hot Air, “The largest solar panel manufacturers in the world are able to sell their inexpensive panels because of where they are located — and that is right where slave labor is made available to them by the Chinese government.”