[Digit-Al]

It would be interesting if someone could do a deep dive into what solar would cost if forced labour was taken out and all workers were paid a fair wage. Would it still be super competitive?

If someone could show that paying a fair wage to workers would still leave solar compellingly cheap then it might incentivise some parts of the supply chain to clean up their act. That's "if" of course.

[kragen]

Yes. The US Department of Commerce has been litigating this every year for over a decade, with a deep dive into what kinds of "subsidies" the top Chinese solar producers might be receiving, including deeply implausible kinds of subsidies, and as I recall one of the "subsidies" they were supposedly receiving was that their employees assembling solar panels were working for lower wages than electronics assembly employees in Indonesia. These investigations, carried out under a "guilty until proven innocent" standard (called "adverse inference in selecting from the facts otherwise available") end up with a quantitative "countervailing duty" to apply to compensate for the "subsidies" as precisely as possible.

You can be certain that forced labor would be considered a "subsidy", although I don't recall ever having seen it mentioned in these filings, so my inference is that it's not a significant factor.

The last one I examined in any detail was https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14..., which imposed a 10.33% countervailing duty on Jinko panels, a 14.27% countervailing duty on Risen panels, and a 12.61% countervailing duty on all other PRC panels. This was enough to ensure that under 1% of panels sold in the US were Chinese solar panels.

But we're talking about competitiveness with fossil fuels here, which are about 200% more expensive than solar power, not 14.27%.