Archived version
Solar panels used widely across Ireland, including in large solar farms, at airports, and on government buildings, were sourced from companies linked to forced labour and environmental devastation in the Xinjiang region of China, RTÉ Investigates has found.
Two Chinese solar panel manufacturers, JA Solar and Jinko Solar, were sourcing a raw material called polysilicon – one of the essential ingredients in the manufacture of panels – from Xinjiang, where China has built a regime of forced labour and repression targeting the region's ethnic minorities, particularly Uyghurs, a system some critics, including the US government, describe as a genocide.
In a landmark 2022 report, the United Nations concluded that human rights abuses in [Xinjiang] were widespread and could constitute crimes against humanity.
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JA Solar and Jinko Solar panels can be found on sites across Ireland, including at a new solar farm at Shannon Airport, opened by Minister for Climate Energy Darragh O’Brien on 28 November, in Wicklow County Council’s car park, and in Ireland’s largest solar farm developments, including at sites owned by ESB.
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The investigation also found that** enormous volumes of coal**, the dirtiest fossil fuel, were being mined and burned in order to process and purify the polysilicon.
This lead to extremely high levels of air pollution in an industrial zone called Zhundong Development Park, one of the most important areas for polysilicon production in China, where polysilicon companies are co-located with vast open-pit coal mines. Three of the world’s top ten polysilicon manufacturers are based in the park.
China's subsidisation of its solar industry has driven down prices and made solar power the most affordable energy source in the world, but critics say this has been done at a human and environmental cost that is too great to ignore.
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China's production of panels ... has vastly overshot demand. It produces twice as many as is needed by the global economy, and the environmental cost has primarily been borne by Xinjiang.
"There are crimes against humanity being perpetrated in the Uyghur region, so we don't see this as a trade issue or even a national security issue," said Patricia Carrier, a human rights lawyer with the Coalition to End Forced Labour in the Uyghur Region.
"The Chinese government has purposefully invested heavily in several sectors to ensure that they are concentrated in or reliant on Uyghur forced labour and also very lax environmental standards...so not only is there forced labour being used, but it is also very environmentally damaging."
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Industry bodies say that China's dominance comes at the cost of social and human rights, and has "jeopardised" and "undermined" Europe's commitment to a "fair and resilient energy transition."
"The nexus between forced labour and the unsustainably low prices of Chinese-made solar PV modules and inverters poses a serious threat," said the European Solar Manufacturing Council in a letter addressed to the then taoiseach Leo Varadkar and energy minister Eamon Ryan in January 2024.
"Without EU regulations scrutinizing goods throughout the value chain for forced labour, European PV manufacturers, adhering to higher social and environmental standards, are jeopardised."
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Though allegations of forced labour and environmental issues in China’s solar industry have been known since at least 2020, Ireland continued to import and deploy panels from JA Solar and Jinko Solar.
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