America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Wednesday, August 10, 2022
JOE BIDEN'S CHINESE PAYMASTERS - Report: U.S. Importers Struggle to Find Solar Panels in China Not Made by Uyghur Slaves
Biden, the frontrunner among 2020 Democrats, often touts his middle-class bonafides on the campaign trail. Although Biden did not become a multi-millionaire until he left the White House in 2017, the same cannot be said of his family. In fact, several members of the Biden clan became immensely wealthy over the span of the former vice president’s 40-year political career. HARIS ALIC
Report: U.S. Importers Struggle to Find Solar Panels in China Not Made by Uyghur Slaves
American solar energy companies are reportedly having difficulty complying with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), a law that went into effect in June requiring importers to prove their goods are not tainted with slave labor from the oppressed Uyghur Muslims of China’s Xinjiang province.
The UFLPA sets tough standards for importers to affirmatively demonstrate that no forced labor was employed in harvesting raw materials or assembling finished products. Everything imported from Xinjiang is presumed tainted unless proof to the contrary is provided.
The industry that seemed most likely to have trouble complying with the UFLPA was textiles, since a great deal of China’s – and, by extension, the world’s – cotton is produced in Xinjiang, and the supply chains for cotton blends in textiles are often murky.
According to a Wall Street Journal(WSJ) report on Tuesday, the solar industry is running into trouble as well, with several shipments detailed or outright refused by U.S. customs since the UFLPA took effect:
Lawyers, auditors and analysts have warned clients that delays are piling up. Top China-based solar-panel manufacturers Longi Green Energy Technology Co. , Jinko Solar Co. and Trina Solar Co. are among those affected, people with knowledge of the events say. Longi has temporarily halted a panel factory in Vietnam that supplies the U.S. as a result, some of those people say.
It is likely to be six months before import challenges related to the new law are resolved, wrote Philip Shen, managing partner at boutique investment bank Roth Capital Partners LLC, in a research note on July 30. In a worst-case scenario, U.S. customers could see 10 gigawatts or more of supplies delayed, Mr. Shen wrote in an earlier note, equivalent to nearly half of what the U.S. installed last year.
As with the cotton blends in textiles, solar panels can include components mixed from several different sources. The brutal Chinese government is the dominant global player in solar energy, and Xinjiang produces about 41 percent of the global supply of polysilicon, which is vital to solar panel construction.
The solar industry knew polysilicon would be scrutinized, so both importers and Chinese suppliers had the necessary paperwork ready – but they were not prepared for U.S. Customs to demand proof that an essential component of polysilicon called quartzite was also free of forced labor. The quartzite mining industry was apparently not prepared to answer such questions.
“Because the panels may have to sit in warehouses for months while companies negotiate with customs officials, some suppliers are choosing to take back the shipments and send them elsewhere,” the WSJ reported.
Even before the new U.S. law went into effect, the WSJ noted that Chinese silicon manufacturers were facing forced labor allegations serious enough to prompt hold orders on solar energy product shipments. The latest disruptions to the supply chain are reportedly adding 30 percent or more to the cost of some solar projects.
Bloomberg News reported in March that “rising demand for solar energy threatens to increase the risk of forced labor in the supply chain.”
Human rights advocates warned that China’s antipathy toward independent investigations makes it extremely difficult to verify that supply chains are free of forced labor. Previous studies found Xinjiang’s polysilicon and quartzite production made disturbingly heavy use of coerced labor, “undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment.”
Researchers at the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham said the “increase in demand for solar energy is likely to worsen conditions for workers.”
China’s government-run Xinhua News Agency announced on Tuesday that the Communist Party would lower gasoline and diesel prices nationwide, a move following growing purchases of cheap Russian petroleum products and of American gasoline leftist President Joe Biden released from the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
“The prices will go down by 130 yuan (about 19 U.S. dollars) per tonne and 125 yuan per tonne, respectively, according to the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC),” Xinhua reported. The communist regime outlet noted that the price drop was the fifth of its kind this year and fourth since June. The government agency announcing the move, Xinhua detailed, acted in response to a drop in international oil prices – partially fueled by a collapse in demand in China, where the Communist Party regularly, and arbitrarily, imposes sweeping Chinese coronavirus lockdowns in major cities without warning.
Xinhua did not report what gasoline and diesel prices were prior to the announced drop on Tuesday or explain how the prices per tonne are reflected in per-liter prices at the gas pump.
The announcement of a price drop for Chinese travelers — who, under the social credit system, can only drive where the government allows them to based on their loyalty to the Communist Party — stands in contrast to ongoing outrage in the United States over gas prices staying at or around $4 a gallon nationwide. The Biden administration has simultaneously attempted to court praise for keeping gas prices under $5 a gallon while arguing that high gas prices may result in more electric vehicle purchases and a more rapid transition to a “green” economy.
“Under the current pricing mechanism, if international crude oil prices change by more than 50 yuan per tonne and remain at that level for 10 working days, the prices of refined oil products such as gasoline and diesel in China will be adjusted accordingly,” Xinhua explained.
In free societies, oil product pricing changes organically in response to supply in demand. In China, the Communist Party has total control over pricing and chooses to increase or drop prices at its will, typically following the trends in international free markets.
While Xinhua claimed that government officials expected oil prices to remain “weak,” a Reuters report on Monday indicated that the Communist Party may artificially lower supply by launching “tax probes” on its refining corporations, potentially limiting refining capacity. Under dictator Xi Jinping, the Party regularly engages in purges of low-level Party officials and persecution of wealthy Chinese business leaders, who run nominally “private” companies beholden to Xi’s whims.
“The new tax investigations, expected to begin later in August per Reuters’ sources, could further put downward pressure on fuel output in China, where demand faltered at the start of the summer due to snap COVID-related lockdowns,” OilPrice.com predicted this week. “The new investigation could last for months and depress the business of independent refiners.”
China is the world’s largest importer of crude oil. Chinese companies participated in the purchase of American oil released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in July, Reuters reported at the time, detailing that the Biden administration had exported over five million barrels of oil to the other side of the world. Biden had announced the release of the reserve oil, meant to be used in cases of national security emergencies, as an attempt to lower gasoline prices at home. The amount of oil in the strategic reserve fell to its lowest level since 1986 in June, potentially creating a crisis for America in the event of an emergency.
“Fact-checking” websites attempted to dilute the outrage surrounding the Chinese purchases of emergency reserve oil following an outcry from Congressional Republicans and the general public, but did not deny the exports.
“About 1 million barrels of crude oil from the reserve are being made available each day for sale to the highest bidding company. Some of the companies have then chosen to export some of the oil to countries around the world, including China,” FactCheck.org confirmed.
The Poynter Institute quoted a gasoline price expert claiming that sales to China would lower gasoline prices in the United States by increasing the supply of global oil, though in a much more long-term way than simply entering the strategic reserve oil into the American market exclusively.
In addition to buying American oil, China has openly boasted of rapidly rising trade volume with Russia following European attempts to sanction Moscow over the eight-year-old war in Ukraine. The Global Times, a Chinese government newspaper, reported on Sunday that China documented a 30-percent trade increase in volume between Russia and China, much of it due to purchases of fossil fuels.
The report indicated that China purchased 247 billion yuan ($36.5 billion) in oil, mineral fuels, and asphalt products from Russia in the first half of 2022.
An American company called UniEnergy developed revolutionary battery technology that could theoretically allow a house to be powered by solar energy.
The company that made this breakthrough ten years ago is dead and gone because the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) inexplicably gave its tech to China while preventing American companies from manufacturing it.
The astounding saga of UniEnergy and its vanadium redox flow batteries was told by National Public Radio (NPR) last week. The story began with government researchers developing a mixture of fluids that could store almost twice as much energy as existing battery technology, with very little degradation over long periods of time.
This was a crucial attribute for next-generation battery technology since the high cost of replacing degraded batteries is a major hurdle to the widespread adoption of large battery-powered equipment like electric vehicles. High-capacity and durable batteries, in turn, are essential to solar power designs because power must be stored to cover periods when the solar panels are not receiving enough sunlight.
With six years of effort and $15 million in U.S. taxpayer funding, researchers created a high-powered battery using vanadium that could last for up to 30 years. The lead scientist on the project, Gary Yang, secured a license from DOE to manufacture the batteries in 2012 and established UniEnergy Technologies.
Yang said he had trouble lining up American investors for his battery project – but Chinese money came on board thanks to businessman Yanhi Liu and his company, Dalian Rongke Power Co. Ltd.
The next part of the story should be drearily familiar to any student of Chinese technology theft: Rongke Power at first provided money for the battery project, then began handling some of the manufacturing, and soon was doing nearly all of the manufacturing. In 2019, UniEnergy told its engineers they would have to start living and working in China for four months out of each year. UniEnergy was no longer making enough batteries at its U.S. facilities to meet the terms of its DOE license.
NANTONG, CHINA – MAY 30, 2022 – Lithium battery modules are produced on an automated production line at kingfisher New Energy Technology (Nantong) Co., LTD. ‘s workshop in Hai ‘an High-tech Zone, Jiangsu Province, May 30, 2022. (Photo credit should read CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
In 2021, Yang decided to cut American workers completely out of the equation by transferring his license to Netherlands-based Vanadis Power, which had a long-term plan to shift some manufacturing from China to Germany, and then eventually back to the United States. Vanadis executives said the German stage of this plan had to come first due to European Union (EU) manufacturing requirements.
American requirements had vanished completely from the story by this point, but in July 2021, someone from UniEnergy finally got around to telling DOE that the battery developed with American science and taxpayer funding would now belong to a Chinese company and its European partner.
NPR suspected no one bothered to tell the Biden DOE that Vanadis was not an American company and there was no evidence DOE did any diligence on the matter, even though Vanadis’ own website said its super-batteries would be made in China – and China was making a huge deal about controlling this revolutionary technology, with demonstration projects and additional research funded by the Chinese Communist government.
DOE officials admitted to NPR that they rely on “good faith disclosures” from corporations instead of doing their own research. It took DOE a grand total of ninety minutes to sign off on the transfer of UniEnergy’s license to Vanadis.
The gigantic federal agency remained comatose until another American company, Forever Technology, tirelessly badgered it into noticing that China just walked away with yet another piece of valuable American-made “green” technology.
“How is it that the national lab did not require U.S. manufacturing? Not only is it a violation of the license, it’s a violation to our country,” asked exasperated Forever Energy CFO Joanne Skievaski.
Yang’s company UniEnergy is dead and gone, its employees laid off and its facilities shuttered. Forever Energy started trying to get the vanadium battery technology license over a year ago, while Communist China was merrily cranking out batteries using the technology our federal government helpfully gave it. Dalian Rongke has become the world’s top producer of vanadium redox flow batteries, and even gung-ho Skievaski admitted it would be difficult for any American company to catch up with China’s head start.
According to NPR, the DOE finally woke up from its decade-long regulatory nap and canceled Dalian Rongke’s license after NPR bombarded the agency with questions about it.
The Chinese are, to put it mildly, highly unlikely to stop making the batteries just because the U.S. government finally got around to terminating their license. In fact, China announced a new 800-megawatt battery farm using vanadium technology in May. The co-founder of Vanadis Power, Roelof Platenkamp, was quoted in Western media coverage of the announcement, explaining how the U.S.-taxpayer-funded technology given to China works.
The Register, a technology website, noted last week that while some vanadium redox flow batteries are made in the United States, there are currently no U.S. production sites for the specific technology described in the NPR article.
Incidentally, NPR made a point of mentioning that lead battery project scientist and UniEnergy founder Gary Yang was “born in China but is a U.S. citizen and got his Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut.”
The article does not explicitly accuse Yang of working on Beijing’s behalf all along, but it does pointedly marvel at some of the strange decisions he made along the way, and Skievaski dismissed Yang’s assertion that no American company had the infrastructure to build his batteries as “hogwash.” At one point, the article quotes Yang insisting that “he didn’t send the battery and his engineers abroad to help China.”
No comments:
Post a Comment