The global transition from a fossil-fuel driven economy to one run by renewable energy envisions China playing a crucial role: especially when it comes to harnessing solar energy. Not only does China manufacture more than 60 per cent of the world’s solar panels, it also constitutes the biggest market, accounting for about half of all solar power installed around the globe. If all of its 130 gigawatts of solar energy were generating electricity at once, China could power the whole of the UK multiple times over.
However, the solar energy story is not as promising as it might seem to be: it is also marked by some serious social and environmental issues that we urgently need to address. This article highlights the implications of China’s solar energy infrastructure in its Western periphery and the costs of assimilating the ethic minorities in its borderlands into the production chain. It culminates with questioning of the environmental sustainability of Chinese solar panels, for which China lacks recycling policies.
China’s north and north-western “vast, sun-drenched plains”, are “home to some of the biggest solar farms” in the world. The incentives behind developing the solar energy infrastructure in that area are availability of lots of space and a reasonable reliability of solar energy as a resource. However, it has been observed that China’s interests in investing in and around places like Tibet and Xinjiang are not merely to do with availability, but deeply politically motivated.
In Tibet, China is accused of trying to cement its authority, by building huge solar farms, such as the 850-megawatt Longyangxia Dam facility on the Tibetan Plateau, counting four million panels and spreading over 10 square miles of the high desert. This claim is based on the premise that Tibet, an autonomous region where China’s claim are resented by many locals , has already witnessed Chinese attempts in using infrastructure as “a friendly forerunner to political power”. Thess tactics are not new to Tibet and locate their genesis in the Chinese Communist Party’s development of Tibet’s first highway.
Xinjiang, predominantly a home to Uighurs, is where “a number of China’s big solar manufacturers” have began operating, “in partnership with foreign companies”. Polysilicon, a key material used for solar panels, is produced in the territory in bulk and is part of what the world’s solar power surge depends on. Of the millions of solar panels all over the globe, nearly all are made out of Chinese polysilicon.
However, not only there are numerous reports of Uighurs being “herded into so-called re-education camps”, but also that local people are being used as forced labour in the solar industry.
Human rights researches and experts are in fact, flagging that solar companies woking in Xinjiang are absorbing workers and members from the Uighur minority in work programs that perpetuate “the persecution of one of China’s most vulnerable ethnic groups”. In the meantime, the Chinese government denies any allegation of human rights abuse, claiming that such projects are directed at uprooting many “from farms to work in factories”, in order to pull them out of poverty, and offers subsidies to companies drawing on Xinjiang minorities.
While China is credited with almost half of the global share of solar panel production (of which the vast majority reaches the international market), the environmental costs emerging from such large scale supply is often ignored. Solar panels in fact, contain “toxic metals like lead, chromium and cadmium, which can be harmful to humans”, and can potentially “leak from electronic waste dumps into drinking water supplies”, posing serious threats to the health of the people in the regions where they are produced. Additionally, their manufacturing also relies on “hazardous materials”, such as “sulphuric acid and phosphine gas”, which make them difficult to recycle, and have a lifespan of just around 30 years.
That said, if no solar panel recycling program is put in place in China, as it’s currently the case, by 2050, 20 million tonnes of photovoltaic panel waste could be accumulated in China alone. This image contrasts the reality in Europe, which put in place regulations “requiring producers to take responsibility for recycling the panels” back in 2012. China’s “weaker environmental standards” makes the environmental impacts of its solar panels “about twice that of those produced in Europe”.
The case for moving away from China’s solar energy industry, based on concerns around its social and environmental implications, is arguably quite strong, and as such, it requires its civil society members to question not only the ways that their governments might be complicit in implementing Chinese-made solar panels, but also their own beliefs around the solar energy industry more widely.
Reconsidering the solar energy story, is in fact, an increasingly urgent task, if we want to ensure that the desired green transition is sustainable and more importantly, free from humanitarian or ecological abuses.