Michael Shellenberger, an author who writes about politics and the environment, called for an end to purchasing solar panels from China because some of them are produced through forced labor.
“We must ban all solar panels imported from China,” Shellenberger said in a tweet. “They are being made by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims against whom genocide is being committed. They’re cheap because they're made with slave labor. The subsidy for solar is blood money.”
An investigation found that Uyghur Muslims in China's Xinjiang province have been forced to participate in labor to help produce solar panels, the BBC reported in 2021. The Chinese government claimed this was in accordance with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) law, and that workers are engaged voluntarily in a government effort to alleviate poverty, researchers at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom said.
“However, significant evidence – largely drawn from government and corporate sources – reveals that labor transfers are deployed in the Uyghur Region within an environment of unprecedented coercion, undergirded by the constant threat of re-education and internment,” the researchers said, the BBC reported.
A report released by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) on Aug. 31 confirmed that members of the Uyghur community and other ethnic minorities in China had been sent to “re-education” camps in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The report said they had been subjected to forced labor, sexual violence or other forms of abuse.
More than 80% of the global supply of solar panels comes from China. That share is expected to increase to 95% by 2025, Down to Earth reported.
One out of every seven solar panels in the world comes from China's Xinjiang region, according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). China has helped bring costs down worldwide for solar PV, with benefits for clean energy transitions, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a July press release. Further strain on global supply chains to meet growing demand poses challenges for governments to address due to the level of geographic concentration, she said. But it offers chances to diversify production and make it more resilient.
