ROSS CLARK: Spare a thought for slave labour constructing photo voltaic panels

In Ed Miliband’s fevered imagination his plan to plaster the countryside with solar panels and wind farms will not only guarantee our national energy security and save us all £300 a year on our energy bills, it will also create thousands of ‘well-paid green jobs’.

True, it will create work for some, but it is less likely to be for blue collar workers beavering away in Britain than for Uyghur slaves being exploited by the Chinese state.

As with so much of our manufacturing industry, China has succeeded in gobbling up much of the West’s market share in solar panels over the past few years.

In the mid-2000s, the country had virtually no involvement in the industry.

Now, according to the International Energy Agency, it makes 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels. China’s solar panel industry has invested $50 billion (£39 billion) in their production – ten times as much as the whole of Europe – and employs 300,000 people.

If that market share had been won fairly, then I would say: ‘Good luck to China.’ But sadly, it seems that much of the industry has been built on the backs of people who are as far away as possible from Miliband’s vision of a happy and well-remunerated green workforce.

The problem centres on a material called polysilicon, which is used in the manufacture of 95 per cent of the world’s solar panels. Nearly half of all that polysilicon comes from a single source: factories in the Uyghur, or Xinjiang, region of North West China.

To call them ‘factories’ is perhaps too kind – forced labour camps would be a better description. According to research by the Helena Kennedy Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, they are surrounded by razor wire fences, steel gates and security cameras.

LARGE numbers of the Uyghur and Kazakh workers within them are not free to leave, with local police withholding their ID cards, which are compulsory for travel in China.

‘First person reports indicate that people working in the camps are either unpaid, paid far less than the minimum wage, or have their salaries reduced with the explanation that they owe a debt to their employers for food or transport to work,’ the study concludes.

Communist Party apparatchiks in Beijing describe what amounts to modern day slavery as a ‘labour transfer programme’, aimed at boosting the economy of the Uyghur region.

According to the Sheffield Hallam report, all four of the polysilicon manufacturers are involved in the labour transfer programme. What’s more, these ‘factories’ supply polysilicon to the world’s largest manufacturers of solar panels, making it extremely difficult for Western buyers to ensure that their supply chains are clean of slave labour.

That is something to remember next time a government minister marvels at how far the cost of solar panels has fallen in recent years.

In one of his first moves as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband approved the construction of three huge solar farms in the east of England, in one case against the advice of the Planning Inspectorate, a government quango that believed the benefit of the project would not justify the loss of productive farmland.

Miliband is promising many more projects like this. Labour’s manifesto stated that the party wishes to treble solar power in Britain by 2030. That would mean a further 180 square miles of countryside disappearing under solar panels – more than the area of the Isle of Wight.

I asked Miliband’s department what it was doing to ensure that the boom in solar energy won’t inadvertently involve slave labour. Its response was far from reassuring. It told me that it had issued Overseas Business Risk Guidance, which ‘makes clear to UK companies the risk of operating in certain regions and urges them to conduct appropriate due diligence when making business decisions’.

It also says that companies with a turnover of £36 million or more have reporting responsibilities under the Modern Slavery Act, and that its Solar Taskforce will look into the issue of forced labour in supply chains.

But the Government is going to have to face up to the fact that polysilicon produced in forced labour camps is at present endemic in the world’s solar industry. Moreover, solar panels manufactured in China are made with a heavy contribution from filthy coal power – coal still accounts for 60 per cent of all electricity generated in the country, largely because it is so cheap.

Indeed, a coal plant was opened in the Uyghur region in 2008 specifically to kick off the solar panel industry. If Miliband wants to achieve his dream of genuinely clean energy, that is something else that will have to be addressed.

And we shouldn’t forget the waste produced in manufacturing solar panels and disposing of them at the end of their useful life, which is typically around 20 years. As Ute Collier, deputy director of the International Renewable Energy Agency warned last year, there are currently no facilities for recycling the vast number of solar panels around the world, which will soon be starting to be decommissioned.

‘It is going to be a waste mountain by 2050 unless we get recycling chains going now,’ she said.

The environmental and social issues with solar panels are similar to those with electric car batteries and wind turbines, both of which have been promoted as ‘clean’ ways to decarbonise our economy. Yet they are nothing of the sort – even if they produce little pollution at the place where they are used.

Many electric cars still depend heavily on a rare metal called cobalt, 70 per cent of which is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Around a quarter of the cobalt from the DRC is produced by so-called ‘artisanal miners’ – freelance operators who work in a dangerous and polluted environment. Among them are many children.

According to research by Harvard University’s TH Chan School of Public Health, working conditions are ‘subhuman’ and ‘degrading’. Workers are exposed to high levels of radioactive uranium and radon gas, and many suffer fatal accidents. Yet the end product – cobalt – goes into vehicles which are marketed in the West as green dream machines.

Ironically, Chinese-made electric cars tend to be cleaner because they use a different battery technology, which does not require cobalt.

As for Miliband’s plans to massively expand the wind industry, it threatens to create another waste mountain. Unlike the vertical pylons on which turbine blades are mounted, the blades themselves tend not to be manufactured from easily-recyclable steel.

Instead, their curved forms are made from composite materials including carbon fibre and epoxy resin. These are far harder to recycle and, while there have been some efforts to develop ways of recycling them, most tend to be dumped in landfill sites when they have reached the end of their 20-year lives.

Miliband loves to portray Britain’s oil and gas industry as some kind of Dickensian hangover from the past but it has well-developed ways of dealing with its waste. Moreover, while the life of a North Sea oil rig worker is not exactly a bowl of cherries, workers are not held in conditions of slavery.

The Energy Secretary is fixated only on carbon emissions – and only on Britain’s territorial emissions at that. He overlooks the human misery and environmental problems which underlie so much of the green energy industry.

Oh, and it turns out that the £300 saving on energy bills that we have been promised is just so much hot air. Ministers refused to confirm the figure in Parliament last week amid speculation that civil servants have told them it can’t be justified.

• Ross Clark is the author of Net Zero: How An Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (And Won’t Even Save The Planet)