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 that year was using polysilicon, a key component in manufacturing solar panels,from Chinese suppliers who received materials from entities that have been banned by the Department of Homeland Security because of their dependence on the forced labor of Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang province, Bloomberg reported in July.
Hanwha’s suppliers have received polysilicon from sub-suppliers that have been sanctioned by the US, including Xinjiang Daqo New Energy Co. Ltd. and Xinjiang GCL New Energy Material Technology.
Between 2021 and 2023, Xinjiang Daqo received the majority of its polysilicon from the province and shipped it to TCL Zhonghuan Renewable Energy Technology Co., one of Hanwha’s two primary suppliers.
Gokin Solar Co., the other supplier, received at least a third of its polysilicon last year from Daqo and another Xinjiang-based entity that has yet to be sanctioned.
A representative for Shanghai-based Daqo told Bloomberg that it was aware of its Xinjiang subsidiary being sanctioned under the US law.
Another sanctioned entity was a joint venture between TCL and GCL Technology Holdings Ltd., the parent company of Xinjiang GCL New Energy Material Technology, which handed over $316 million in polysilicon material to TCL last year — despite the venture being sanctioned in 2021.
In December, TCL left the venture and a GCL rep told Bloomberg it has a “zero-tolerance attitude toward human rights violations such as forced labor.”
Qcells’ parent company also had at least one facility based in the northwestern Chinese province — but ceased all operations there in April 2024.
“Forced labor is a human rights abuse that we take very seriously as a company,” Qcells spokeswoman Debra DeShong told The Post in a statement, adding that the company “terminates any supplier that does not meet our ethical standards and Code of Conduct which is in alignment with US law, prohibiting the use of forced labor anywhere in our supply chain.”
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 August 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.
Bret Manley, 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.”
DeShong 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 or produced with forced labor.
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.
“The law is clear: any good made with forced labor, wholly or in part, must be barred from entering our country,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the bill’s authors, told The Post. “It’s high time the Biden-Harris Administration takes decisive action to enforce the law.”
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, and 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 reported.
Manley, however, said there are already US-based polysilicon suppliers that 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.
DeShong told The Post Qcells is “the only solar company working to stand up the entire pv [Photovoltaic] solar supply chain here in the US with a polysilicon facility in Moses Lake, Washington.”
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 on 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 and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
