US solar boom opens $2 billion India door to banned products from China

India's largest solar producer, Waaree Energies Ltd., has sent millions of panels to the US with components from a Chinese company whose products were repeatedly denied entry to the US market over concerns about forced labour, a Bloomberg News examination of Indian and US import records shows. Those components, solar cells produced by China's Longi Green Energy Technology Co. at plants in Malaysia and Vietnam, are used in Waaree panels blanketing solar farms in Texas and other states. Imports of Waaree panels raise questions about how US Customs and Border Protection officials are enforcing a ban on products tied to the repression of Uyghur people in China's Xinjiang region. The agency has detained thousands of shipments of solar panels made by Chinese-owned companies since it began enforcing the ban in June 2022 — interventions that companies can overturn by providing evidence their supply chains don't involve Xinjiang sources. That focus on China has created an opportunity for Indian solar producers, which exported almost $2 billion worth of panels to the US in the first 11 months of last year, a fivefold increase over all of 2022, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. "Even panels that say, 'Made in India' are likely to be affected by Uyghur forced labour," Laura Murphy, co-author of an August 2023 report about the solar supply chain, said in October before being named a Customs enforcement adviser at the Department of Homeland Security. Her report said that because polysilicon from multiple sources in China is often blended together, there's a "very high" risk that panels made at Longi factories in Southeast Asia had used at least some materials from Xinjiang.

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