The Dilemma Of 'Green China Inc.'

U.S. businesses can profit from China’s clean-energy boom— if trade tensions don’t disrupt their flow.

- Jeffrey Ball

SO MUCH FOR CLAIMS THAT THE U.S.-CHINA trade war is boosting American jobs. REC Silicon, a Norwegian firm that produces polysilicon at its plant in Moses Lake, Wash., announced in May that it planned to mothball the facility this summer “unless access to Chinese polysilicon markets is restored.”

REC has postponed a final decision, on the chance that a truce might emerge. But the facility’s uncertain future hints at a broad, troubling trend. Polysilicon is a key raw material used to make solar panels; China is its top global consumer. Indeed, China, which has decreed green industries to be a strategic priority, has become the world’s largest producer of clean-energy equipment and of clean energy itself. The U.S. has shown less sustained interest in those arenas—but plenty of interest in quashing the Chinese green giant.

That approach is hurting not just the planet but also America’s bottom line. The transpacific tariff war is nowhere as intense as in the clean-energy sector, where it is backfiring and harming U.S. companies. Anti-China fever is also blinding the U.S. to opportunities, as China’s clean-energy sector modernizes in ways that offer savvy players chances to make money.

Green China Inc. is growing up. The U.S. approach to it should grow up too.