Wind tower tariffs should bring Chinese and domestic clean tech prices closer. Commerce OKs tariffs for wind towers

Wind towers from China and Vietnam are about to get more expensive.

Utility-scale wind towers from China will face anti-dumping duties from 20.85 percent to 72.69 percent, the Commerce Department said Friday.


Towers from Vietnam face anti-dumping duties between 52.67 percent and 59.91 percent.

The anti-dumping tariff, designed to counteract nations selling goods in the U.S. at below-market rates to snatch up more market share, adds to countervailing duties of between 13.74 percent and 26 percent, the department announced in May.

That means some wind towers from China could face tariffs as high as nearly 100 percent.

Both tariffs are preliminary and open to modification — potentially up or down — before Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission finalize them later this year or in early 2013.

The tariffs on wind towers from China, a $222 million trade business in 2011, and Vietnam, $79 million in 2011, are small compared with the tariffs Commerce slapped on Chinese photovoltaic technology earlier this year.

In both cases, domestic manufacturers banded together to complain about unfair trade practices from China that they say undercut U.S. companies and push them out of the U.S. market.

Tariffs would level the playing field in theory, bringing the prices of Chinese clean tech closer to those of domestic manufacturers. But critics of tariffs say they ultimately will raise the price of solar and wind power, hurting the industry’s growth overall.

Both cases are also part of growing clean-tech trade tension between China and the United States. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced last week it will investigate U.S. solar products — particularly polysilicon, a major chunk of U.S. exports across the Pacific.

And earlier this week, solar companies petitioned the European Union to look into China’s solar trade practices. The EU has more than a month to decide whether it will investigate.

Chinese companies aren’t happy about the potential for investigations from two of the biggest markets for solar technology.

“If the EU were to follow the precedent of the U.S. and launch an anti-dumping investigation on Chinese solar products, the Chinese solar industry would suffer a fatal blow,” Yingli Solar’s chief strategy officer, Wang Yiyu, said at a briefing Thursday, according to Reuters. “The investigation would also trigger a wholescale trade war between China and the EU, which would cause huge losses to both parties.”

Some groups in the U.S., such as sun-drenched Arizona’s Greater Phoenix Economic Council, don’t want the tariffs either.

“As a result of Commerce’s preliminary decision, Greater Phoenix solar companies may be required to pay prohibitive tariffs, sometimes in excess of 200 percent. These tariffs will damage the economy of Greater Phoenix and negatively impact job growth and future opportunities in the state,” the group wrote this week to acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank.

The Solar Energy Industries Association and opponents of clean-tech tariffs have called for China and the U.S. to hold off on taking trade actions in favor of an open dialogue, a call that does not seem to have caught the attention of either side.

President Barack Obama and his administration have maintained a hard line on most issues concerning China, including clean-tech trade.

“We have seen a lot of questionable competitive practices coming out of China when it comes to the clean-energy space,” Obama said in November.