The Harris-Biden administration helped out a South Korean solar company whose supply chain is tied to Chinese slave labor, a list of federally sanctioned entities shows, handing out nearly $2 billion to the firm to expand its presence in Georgia.
Vice President Kamala Harris, 59, visited Hanwha Qcells manufacturing plant in Dalton, Ga., in April 2023, touting how the administration’s tax credits would expand the facility and help Hanwha build another one in nearby Cartersville to produce millions of panels as part of “the largest investment in solar energy in our nation’s history.”
But the Seoul-based company is using polysilicon, a key component in manufacturing solar panels, from at least two suppliers that have been banned by the Department of Homeland Security because of their dependence on the forced labor of Ugyhur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province, Bloomberg reported in July.
Qcells’ sub-suppliers include the sanctioned Xinjiang GCL New Energy Material Technology and Xinjiang Daqo New Energy, Co. Ltd. Its parent company Hanwha also has at least one of its own facilities based in the northwestern Chinese province.
Biden, 81, first announced the partnership with the South Korean company in January 2023 — and his former Senate chief of staff, Danny O’Brien, was hired by Qcells as its executive vice president and head of US corporate affairs by March.
Lobbyists had raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars while advocating for handouts to the firm to be included the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Senate disclosures show, and the hard work paid off with $230 million in tax credits after the president signed the administration’s signature climate bill into law in December 2022.
The following June, Qcells became a preferred vendor for the US government — even providing solar panels for the Pentagon — and the Department of Energy awarded a $1.5 billion loan guarantee in August to set up the Cartersville plant.
While a spokeswoman for Qcells denied to Bloomberg that forced labor is “used to produce goods supplied to Qcells,” Bret Manley, the executive director of the nonpartisan Energy Fair Trade Coalition, told The Post that “any product that sources from China is problematic.”
“Not all Chinese polysilicon is problematic, but China’s laws prohibit Chinese companies from complying with sanctions, foreign sanctions that target their economy,” Manley said. “So if you are a Chinese company that is engaged in forced labor, it is against Chinese law for you to disclose that to the benefit of the United States.”
The Qcells spokeswoman, Debra DeShong, also admitted to Bloomberg that Hanwha doesn’t have the authority to track its polysilicon sub-suppliers — but does ask them to sign affidavits confirming their facilities aren’t in Xinjiang.
Polysilicon is used to make wafers or ingots that are exported to the US and manufactured into solar panels. China produces roughly 80% of the world’s supply, with one-third of its material originating in Xinjiang, according to Bloomberg.
The DHS banned-entities list is a result of the 2022 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation signed into law by Biden.
That same year, Qcells broke off its business with one of its Chinese sub-suppliers that “failed to meet traceability standards.”
In 2023, an independent report by UK-based Sheffield Hallam University also noted that Qcells was at “very high risk” of allowing polysilicon tied to forced labor into its supply chains.
“DHS is charged with enforcing this,” Manley said. “If they detain your shipment and claim that you have exposure to forced labor, you have to prove [otherwise] — they assume you’re guilty. You have to prove that you are not. And if you can’t prove that you’re not, then you cannot import that product.”
“The Biden-Harris Administration is willfully ignoring their own law to the apparent benefit of one company with significant exposure to forced labor,” he added. “It’s simply not possible the Administration is unaware of this fact. You can’t claim to care about human rights while simultaneously sending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to companies that profit from forced labor.”
Qcells is the number-one supplier of residential and commercial solar panels to the US, fueled largely by its business with the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, has announced plans to invest a total of $3 billion to expand its US footprint.
The company could net more than $900 million per year from the IRA’s tax credits until 2032, Bloomberg noted.
Manley, however, noted that there are already US-based polysilicon suppliers the Biden-Harris administration could have tapped to reshore manufacturing and achieve its climate-related goals — something Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have boasted about on the campaign trail.
Hemlock, a Michigan-based polysilicon producer, used to be one of the world’s largest suppliers, while Wacker, a firm based in Germany, already has a large footprint in Bradley County, Tenn.
“If we’re going to spend these billions of dollars on green technologies, we should spend them in the United States,” Manley emphasized. “Or at the very least, we should be spending them in places that don’t have problematic human rights records and have ethical sourcing of materials.”
Instead, the decision to reward foreign firms with Chinese sub-suppliers will make solar panel production “always reliant on China,” he said, which can undercut US producers with cheap labor.
In Harris’ Sept. 10 debate with former President Donald Trump, she proudly mentioned that she “was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act” and her administration had “invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy.”
“We have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world,” she said.
In his own war of words with GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance Oct. 1, Walz also touted the investments.
“What we’ve seen out of the Harris administration now, the Biden-Harris administration, is we’ve seen this investment, we’ve seen massive investments, the biggest in global history that we’ve seen in the Inflation Reduction Act, has created jobs all across the country,” Walz said. “The largest solar manufacturing plant in North America sits in Minnesota.”
“[T]he real issue is that if you’re spending hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars of American taxpayer money on solar panels that are made in China, number one, you’re going to make the economy dirtier,” Vance responded in a question about renewable energy efforts effects on climate.
“We should be making more of those solar panels here in the United States of America,” the Ohio GOP senator said, advocating for a total reshoring of the whole production process.
The Harris campaign, the White House and Qcells did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
