Europe’s solar power industry has warned policy-makers not to impose tariffs on imports, amid fears that disrupting supplies of products from China would seriously damage Europe’s ability to rapidly install clean energy.
The European Commission this month launched an investigation that could lead to tariffs to protect EU producers against cheaper Chinese electric vehicle imports. Meanwhile, Germany is examining options including trade protections to shield local solar manufacturers from falling global prices, a government document seen by Reuters showed.
“Instead of sanctioning the entire industry through tariffs, we must incentivize solar installations that originate from resilient European solar production. This way, the deployment of solar energy can continue undisturbed while the European solar manufacturing can grow steadily,” said Erfurt, who is CEO of Swiss solar cell maker Meyer Burger.