By Lena Babaeva Coradini

This is a headline you don’t read too often: "Buy Chinese." In this OpEd piece, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argues that Ameican manufacturers, investors and consumers gain far more from China’s low-cost solar panels and super-efficient wind turbines than they lose.  

America needs policies that will release its potential for alternative energy, but a trade war with China is a terrible idea — for American jobs, prosperity and the environment.

The Chinese have successfully challenged European and American dominance of solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing. Chinese companies now account for half of the world's solar panel production. But American manufacturers, investors and consumers gain far more from China's low-cost solar panels and super-efficient wind turbines than they lose.

On a recent visit to China, I toured solar panel plants owned by that nation's largest manufacturers, including Yingli, Lightway and Daqo. Yingli, for example, uses dozens of giant steel casting furnaces made by GT Solar, a Merrimack, N.H., company employing 450 workers. GT Solar controls 80% of the China market for this component and a significant share for other systems it sells to Chinese manufacturers. Last year, its revenues from China were $544 million. A spokesman for GT Solar, Jeff Nestel-Patt, told me that demand for the company's products by Chinese panel manufacturers has been crucial to its survival.

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In addition to U.S. manufacturers, U.S. investors benefit from China's renewable energy industry. Daqo, like many large Chinese solar companies, is listed on an American stock exchange, and U.S. investors own a significant number of shares. "If China retaliates, the trade war will hurt U.S. manufacturers very badly, and, indirectly, U.S. investors will suffer if stock prices decline," said Daqo's chief executive, Gongda Yao.

Finally, widespread proliferation of low-cost solar panels from China generates tens of thousands of installation, construction and manufacturing jobs in the U.S., as well as providing cheap, abundant energy.

The same dynamics apply to wind power. . . .

Good points.

On the other hand, the question is still out there on "Who Will Sail Ahead in Wind Power Race?"

For an indication of whether China or the U.S. will lead the way in alternative energy capacity like windmills, it helps to check which way the wind is blowing – in Washington.

Last year China pulled ahead of the U.S. in installed wind power generating capacity, holding a margin of about 4%, according to figures published this month by industry associations in each country.

Policies in Washington may dictate how long China’s reign sustains. .  . .

 “This is definitely a milestone in the history of China’s clean energy development. China won this round in the global race for a green future, proving that it has the potential to become a world superpower in renewable energy,” said Yang Ailun, head of Greenpeace East Asia’s climate and energy campaign in a Jan. 12 statement.

About 9% of China’s energy mix was renewable last year, short of a target of 10% for the end of the last five-year plan, which expired in 2010.

In contrast, the pace of U.S. wind-power installations about halved from the previous rapid pace during the year to 5,115 megawatts, the American Wind Energy Association, or AWEA, announced this week. The national total edged up to 40,180 megawatts, with a quarter of it in Texas.

AWEA blamed the industry’s “boom-and-bust cycle” on “short-term incentives” from Congress that are “not conducive to business investment and increased employment.” Specifically the association was referring to a year of uncertainties over economic incentives, including a federal tax credit that was renewed in December but only for another year.

Now the industry is in a hurry. In the rush to start work before the credit expires, the association said, 5,600 megawatts of capacity was under construction in the fourth quarter of last year, far more than the total installed last year.

Policy support has been more consistent in China.

Certainly a complex issue.  How much to compete versus allow free market competition? How much to support an industry? How much does China support their industry? It will be interesting how the policies will play out both in the United States and in China.