It was the quiet changing of a lock that sent shockwaves through rural America. The news that a Beijing-backed firm with a ‘pledge of allegiance’ to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was to build an EV battery plant in a small town near Lake Michigan had proved too much for outraged locals.
‘My family members fought communism, and you’re bringing it right here,’ one angry resident told the board of Green Charter Township, which rubber-stamped the plans.
Hours later, the rebels switched the locks on the main government building in a symbolic act of defiance.
It was an emphatically American response – described by one newsreader as something that compatriots ‘across the country fantasise about’.
Over the pond, the Brits have been a little more restrained.
In January last year, a few months after the Michigan revolt, a solar energy storage plant began operations in Thanet, Kent, equipped with lithium batteries supplied by a Chinese factory belonging to that very same CCP-linked firm, Gotion.
Its power storage systems were provided by another Chinese company, Shanghai Electric, and its opening marked the completion of an impressive UK solar portfolio for the firm, including projects in Lincolnshire, Devon, Winchester, Essex, Norfolk, Scunthorpe and Grimsby.
Not that you would know it. There has barely been a peep about it in the British Press. It is symptomatic of the growing transatlantic divide on China.
A solar farm near Great Wilbraham, Britain
A worker producing photovoltaic (PV) modules for solar panels in a factory in Suqian, east China’s Jiangsu province
Turbines in the Moray Offshore Windfarm East, off the Aberdeenshire coast
In Washington, lawmakers have slapped tariffs on Chinese tech to safeguard critical energy infrastructure.
In contrast, the UK has gone with a begging bowl to Beijing as Ed Miliband seeks its aid to propel our transition to ‘a net-zero future’ and we’ve increasingly become a dumping ground for cheap Chinese green-technology goods.
Opaque supply chains and company structures have hampered the task of assessing the scale of our predicament.
Today, however, a Daily Mail investigation reveals the true extent of the Chinese chokehold on the UK renewables sector.
In a comprehensive audit of Beijing’s creeping infiltration of our energy industry, this newspaper has found Chinese firms are now linked to around a third of all offshore wind projects in the UK, worth a total of £56 billion.
And, in an ominous sign for our national security, four of the companies have been placed on a Pentagon blacklist for allegedly working with the Chinese military.
Meanwhile, at least half a dozen Beijing-backed firms singled out for their links to human rights abuses have extensive solar power portfolios in Britain.
In response to the Mail’s findings, Luke de Pulford, chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, warned: ‘This degree of dependency on a totalitarian state which wants to reshape the world order in its own image is utter madness.’
Ed Miliband seeks Beijing’s aid to propel our transition to ‘a net-zero future’
Employees work on the production line of solar panels at a 5G intelligent workshop of Jiangsu Dongci New Energy Technology
Northern China’s Inner Mongolia region is a vast expanse of verdant grassland, arid desert and large sections of the Great Wall of China.
It is also home to the world’s biggest solar farm – an £8.5 billion project that covers 200,000 acres of desert, the size of New York City. The farm is operated by a subsidiary of the China Three Gorges Corp., responsible for the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power station and a truly staggering feat of engineering that straddles the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, Central China.
But it seems there is no job too small for this titan of the energy industry. China Three Gorges Europe, another of its subsidiaries, has also bought a 10 per cent stake in a modest wind farm off the coast of Scotland.
The purchase, in January 2019, cost the state-owned company £35 million – small change compared to the tens of billions it makes in annual revenue. So small and seemingly irrelevant is this 100-turbine North Sea wind farm to the Chinese Communist Party that it begs the question: why?
A clue may lie in a list kept by the Pentagon that tracks firms it deems under the control of the Chinese military. Inclusion does not result in immediate sanctions, but it is designed to discourage business with those on it – part of Washington’s efforts to counter China’s so-called ‘military-civil fusion’ strategy.
According to the Pentagon, controlling firms like this is an ‘aggressive’ tactic by the CCP to develop the most technologically advanced military in the world by forcing its civilian and commercial sectors to work on behalf of its army.
In other words, ‘military-civil fusion’ means state-owned companies are encouraged to acquire – including through theft – cutting-edge technology from across the world for the benefit of the People’s Liberation Army.
According to the Mail’s audit, Chinese businesses are tied to 15 of 50 British offshore wind farms in operation or in development.
President Xi Jinping’s China has produced 98 per cent of the UK’s solar panels
Four of these appear on the Pentagon list. One is SDIC Intelligence, whose parent company is the State Development and Investment Corporation, the largest state-owned investment company in China.
SDIC is involved in four UK wind farms via investments made by an Edinburgh-based subsidiary with stakes ranging from 25 per cent to full ownership of both onshore and offshore projects.
A spokesman for the subsidiary said it was ‘proud to play a central role in delivering the UK’s net zero ambitions’ with its shareholders’ ‘robust backing and extensive experience’.
Gotion’s US operation – behind the controversial EV battery plant in Michigan – has denied allegiance to the CCP and dismissed claims its factory will be used as a base for Chinese spies as ‘baseless’. It is not on the Pentagon list.
Stealing wind turbine technology has already happened. In July 2018, Chinese manufacturer Sinovel Wind Group was fined $1.5 million by the US government for a ‘brazen’ scheme to steal such technology from an American rival.
And, in January 2023, a Chinese engineer working in New York was sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring to steal trade secrets surrounding General Electric’s turbine technologies on behalf of the Chinese state. The US Department of Justice deemed it a threat to national security.
‘This isn’t mad conspiracy theory stuff,’ says Mr de Pulford. ‘I don’t think anybody who understands what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to do would allow any investment in sensitive infrastructure from China.
‘That is why the US is rapidly trying to rip out the remaining vestiges of it.’
And the Intelligence and Security Committee has warned of the specific risk to the UK energy sector of intellectual property theft by Chinese companies. A report in July 2023 said Beijing had a ‘strategic imperative to acquire technology that will enable it to improve and increase its domestic energy production’.
The committee revealed Chinese cyber hackers have already targeted the UK energy sector, citing theft of commercially sensitive information from an unnamed FTSE 100 energy company.
It added, apocalyptically: ‘We are on a trajectory for the nightmare scenario where China steals blueprints, sets standards, and builds products, exerting political and economic influence at every step.
‘This presents a serious commercial challenge, but also has the potential to pose an existential threat to liberal democratic systems.’
Meanwhile, China’s largest wind turbine company, Mingyang Smart Energy Group, has just been handed ‘priority status’ to set up a manufacturing base in Scotland, despite Norway having rejected the firm’s bid for a tender last year amid concerns over national security.
It was reported this week that Treasury ministers had overruled objections from the Ministry of Defence about Mingyang supplying turbines to the Green Volt North Sea floating offshore wind farm – set to be Europe’s largest. Among the concerns was that the Chinese state could switch off the power once the wind farm is operational, or that the platforms could be used as spy sensors.
The revelations prompted former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith to accuse the Government of ‘yet another desperate attempt to crawl on their stomachs to China’, while shadow energy minister Andrew Bowie warned in the Commons yesterday that Labour’s green revolution will come with a ‘Made in China’ label.
There is a nasty kick in the teeth for the taxpayer, too.
Ed Miliband alongside Sir Keir Starmer during Labour’s General Election campaign earlier this year
The UK government has paid offshore wind farms with Chinese shareholders a total of £270 million to turn off their turbines because of a lack of capacity on the National Grid, according to data shared with the Mail by the Renewable Energy Foundation. And all this before we even get to the solar industry and its slave labour problem. Beijing’s grip on solar is unavoidable, but its stranglehold on Britain is almost total.
Chinese manufacturers account for 80 per cent of the global supply of solar panels – and 98 per cent of those already installed in Britain.
This monopoly has been achieved – in part – through the exploitation of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region of north-west China. Labour is allegedly rounded up from villages and herded into camps surrounded by barbed wire, where they toil for little or no pay. The US and EU have passed laws banning solar products made by slave labour.
But not the UK.
Instead, Energy Secretary Mr Miliband decided to approve three huge solar farms in July, including the 2,100-acre Mallard Pass project on the Lincolnshire/Rutland border to be built by Canadian Solar. The company has been accused by Tory MP Alicia Kearns of ‘maple-washing’ – an attempt to ‘distract’ from its true origins in China. Although based in Canada, it employs more than 80 per cent of its workers in China.
In 2021, four shipments of solar panels made by Canadian Solar were seized by the US government over allegations they were linked with slave labour from the Uyghur Xinjiang regions.
The company has also been accused of links to a firm implicated in the forced transfer of Uyghurs to factories.
Canadian Solar denies this and has said it ‘strongly condemns’ forced labour of any kind, adding: ‘We are confident in the management quality processes we have in place across our international supply chains.
Workers work at the wind power host assembly workshop of Mingyang New Energy Co in Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia, China
‘We have undertaken internal investigations and found no evidence of forced labour within our company or our supply chain.’ But Kearns, MP for Rutland and Stamford, where Mallard Pass is to be built, has continued to raise the issue in Parliament.
This allegedly prompted a representative of Canadian Solar to contact her staff with what appeared to be an offer of inducements to support the project.
A contemporaneous note made by Kearns’ team – and shared with the Mail – alleges the company representative claimed they could provide funding for ‘a hospital, schools or directly to the worst-affected residents’, adding it was ‘something “we” have done before’ to allow MPs to ‘get something despite an unpopular development going through’.
Canadian Solar said it discussed an ‘opportunity’ for Kearns to target investment but ‘no inducements were made’. It added that consulting stakeholders about ‘targeting support, post planning consent’ is ‘normal industry practice for a project of this scale’.
At least six Chinese-linked companies with extensive UK solar portfolios have alleged ties to slave labour in Xinjiang, including Canadian Solar. Two others, JA Solar and Trina Solar, have supplied solar panels to the British Army.
JA Solar said it is taking action to ensure supply chains are free of slave labour. Trina Solar has yet to comment. And the trade body Solar Energy UK insists the supply chain is clean. It claims firms have now largely ‘decoupled’ themselves from the Xinjiang region and no longer have links to slave labour.
Yet Alan Crawford, co-author of the Sheffield Hallam University report that first exposed the industry’s reliance on forced labour, believes little has improved because supply chains, in his view, don’t change that fast.
He recently told The Times the risk of forced labour entering the supply chain is ‘as high now as it was two years ago’.
A worker producing photovoltaic (PV) modules for solar panels in a factory in Suqian, east China’s Jiangsu province
Academics have also raised doubts over how effectively companies can carry out due diligence, as the Chinese government has put in place laws that make it illegal to ask questions about Xinjiang and forced labour.
So, it seems possible our green and pleasant land is still tainted with the blood-red of slave labour.
Even if industry lobbyists are right that these Chinese supply chains have been cleaned up and we cherry-pick firms that don’t steal our tech, there is still a grave risk in relying so heavily on a hostile foreign state to power our nation.
So, given China’s dominance of the supply chain, is it possible to go green without them? What is an acceptable level of Chinese investment? And why is Whitehall not following Washington’s lead?
‘None of this is easy, and none of this can really be done without China,’ MP Alicia Kearns admits. But she is adamant alternative markets can be built – given time.
But Britain is at a disadvantage. The US has been able to hit Chinese electric cars with tariffs and turbo-charge its domestic manufacturing because it has an industrial base. The UK does not.
Our ageing nuclear sector shows what happens when you try to do it without China. Having effectively put an end to the involvement of China General Nuclear Power Group in three major new plants, ministers are struggling to attract alternative investment.
Of course, courting Beijing is nothing new. When Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, he told Chinese Premier Xi Jinping that working together to achieve the transition to a carbon-neutral energy system was a top priority.
Climate Change and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband answers questions during a visit to Springfields (Preston Lab), National Nuclear Laboratory facility
Much of China’s involvement in the UK renewables sector was in place before the arrival of the new Labour government.
Yesterday, energy minister Kerry McCarthy defended engaging with China, telling MPs: ‘We absolutely need to attract the investment we need to meet our clean power mission to secure our future energy security and in the long run bring down bills for the British people. We need to balance national security concerns in tandem with that.’
But Mr de Pulford says it has been the speed and openness of the new Labour government’s overtures that sets it apart. ‘Are we in a worse position now than we were before? Yes,’ he says.
‘Decisions taken very early on are indicative of the compromises the government is willing to make.
‘It’s selling us up the river in the hope of a quick economic boost.’
This is already causing unease among Labour MPs.
Rotherham MP Sarah Champion, chair of the International Development Committee, told the Mail she was ‘gravely concerned that, without safeguards in place, we will knowingly be transitioning to net zero on the backs of those in slavery’.
In the meantime, as the US changes its locks, Britain is potentially opening the door to Beijing’s blood money – and its spies.
