April 11, 2024 (EIRNS)—As RT reveals, the European Union has launched an investigation into China subsidizing wind turbine companies, charging China with paying special subsidies to export products at low prices, with which European producers cannot compete. EU Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, in charge of competition—chairing the Commissioners’ Group on a “Europe Fit for the Digital Age”—said on April 9 that the probe would examine whether Chinese firms participating in European wind parks may have benefitted from state support. Her probe will look into conditions for the development of wind parks in Spain, Greece, France, Romania, and Bulgaria.
Vestager’s announcement comes just days after the European Commission opened a separate subsidies probe into two Chinese consortia bidding for a solar farm contract in Romania. “We saw the playbook for how China came to dominate the solar panel industry,” Vestager stated during a speech to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, citing “massive subsidies for domestic suppliers.”
She said, “The result is that nowadays, less than 3% of the solar panels installed in the EU are produced in Europe.” She remarked that China was deploying the same strategy across other areas of clean technology, including “exporting excess capacity to the rest of the world at low prices…. We can’t afford to see what happened on solar panels happening again on electric vehicles, wind or essential chips.”
