The solar industry has a slave labor problem.

For many consumers, installing rooftop solar that generates enough excess energy to sell back to the grid for a profit seems like a win-win. Lower energy bills, cleaner energy – everyone wins. Well, almost everything. Unfortunately, many solar panels imported into the US are the product of slave labor in China. This contradiction underscores the moral crisis of our national green energy strategy, which compromises human rights in order to achieve environmental goals.

The most important material for the manufacture of solar panels is polysilicon. It’s as important to solar energy as crude oil is to gasoline. Essentially, polysilicon is molded into tubular ingots, cut into wafers, and then processed into individual cells that fill a solar panel. While the US has sufficient capacity to produce solar panels, China accounts for 95% of the world’s production of polysilicon, ingots and wafers.

The connection between polysilicon and human rights abuses may not be immediately obvious, but the reality is shocking: 45% of global supply Some of this material used to produce green energy in America comes from slave labor in Xinjiang, China, and another 30% comes from other regions of China. If you’re not familiar with Xinjiang, it’s home to about 11 million Uyghurs, a predominantly Turkic-speaking Muslim ethnic group. Over the past decade, the Chinese government detained over 2 million Uyghurs and subjected them to sterilization, imprisonment and slave labor. US government officially marked this campaign as “genocide”.

All Polysilicon Manufacturers in Xinjiang engages in or benefits from slave labor. The remaining supplies from China are likely mixed. Even if this were not true, it would be impossible to prove otherwise.

There have been many legislative efforts to address the supply chain problem. The most famous of these is the Inflation Reduction Act, which offers billions of dollars in tax breaks for renewable energy production. In the solar industry, the main drivers are modular and panel designs. Since the adoption of the IRA there has been massive increase in modular capacity in the USA. The trade-off is that this capacity cannot currently be provided by domestic suppliers alone.

From 2021, the import of goods is prohibited. produced using Uyghur slave labor in the US, and anything coming from Xinjiang is legally considered tainted. To circumvent US sanctions, Chinese polysilicon and wafer manufacturers launder their products through third-party countries such as Malaysia, South Korea and India before shipping the wafers to the US for module manufacturing.

Here are just a few: Indian company Waaree Energies “has shipped millions of panels in the US with components from the Chinese company Longi Green Energy Technology, whose products have been repeatedly denied access to the US market due to concerns about forced labor.” Canadian Solar, a Chinese company headquartered in Canada with major projects in Texas, recently… opened a new object in Xinjiang, under the control of CCP officials, no less. South Korean company Hanwha QCells was recently exposed for significant impact of slave labor. Each of these companies will qualify for hundreds of millions of dollars in tax benefits under the IRA.

Of these, QCells is the most problematic. The White House and Harris campaign are touting their expansion in Dalton, Georgia, a swing state, to sell the benefits of the IRA. In addition, in July this year, QCells became Official Preferred Solar Supplier for the US government, giving it lucrative domestic control over its competitors. Moreover, in August the Ministry of Energy awarded QCells $1.45 billion loan guarantee. Taken together, these actions make QCells an extremely safe bet for investors.

It shouldn’t be this way. The US was recently one of the world’s largest producers of solar-grade polysilicon. This continued until the incentive structure pointed to higher profits and more refined polysilicon used in computer chips. American manufacturers could not compete with the flood of cheap Chinese polysilicon, which was undermined by virtually non-existent labor costs.

One of the goals of the IRA was to create a domestic green energy supply chain. Despite good intentions, the focus on electricity generation capacity has not provided sufficient incentives for essential parts of the supply chain, such as polysilicon, ingots and wafers, to wean the US off our dependence on slave labor.

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Environmental activists fear that eliminating cheap Chinese imports will undermine our green energy goals and tend to bury their heads in the sand on the issue. This is a cynical and depressing reflection of our polarized political environment, which views everything as a zero-sum game. If we have to rely on slave labor to save the planet, who are we saving it for?

It’s time to refocus IRA incentives to ensure we build a truly ethical, green energy economy. Millions of Uighurs are suffering trying to meet global demand, and every time we install panels we become complicit in their oppression. If we are to fight for a sustainable future, it must be a future based on moral clarity. The challenge is not insurmountable, but it does require leaders to prioritize environmental sustainability and human dignity.

Youngmi Park is a North Korean defector, speaker, and best-selling author. To live And While there is time left. Follow X: @YeonmiParkNK