BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Commission has opened a new investigation into subsidies received by Chinese suppliers of turbines destined for wind parks in Europe, in its latest action against manufacturers of clean tech products in China.
The Commission will look into the conditions for the development of wind parks in Spain, Greece, France, Romania and Bulgaria, European Union Commissioner Margrethe Vestager plans to say in a speech to be delivered on Tuesday.
Vestager did not name the companies concerned in a text of her speech at Princeton University in the United States.
The Commission is already investigating whether to impose tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles imports and says it has evidence showing they benefit from subsidies.
Vestager will say that the EU needs to adopt a more systematic approach, with case-by-case investigations meaning the bloc was “playing whack-a-mole”.
“And we need to do it before it is too late. We can’t afford to see what happened on solar panels happening again on electric vehicles, wind or essential chips,” the text of her speech said.
The EU’s installed wind turbines have been mostly made in the bloc, but Chinese manufacturers have been rapidly building to about a two-thirds share of the global market in 2022. For solar panels, Chinese producers have over 90% of the EU market.
The wind power investigation would be under the EU foreign subsidies regulation, which has allowed the Commission since July 2023 to assess whether foreign subsidies allow companies to submit overly advantageous offers in public tenders.
Shares of Danish wind turbine producer Vestas were up 3.7% in early afternoon trading.
Last week, the Commission opened two investigations into whether Chinese bidders in a public tender for a solar power park in Romania had benefited excessively from subsidies.
Its first investigation into foreign subsidies ended after Chinese train maker CRRC Qingdao Sifang Locomotive withdrew from a Bulgarian tender for electric trains.
(Reporting by Inti Landauro and Philip Blenkinsop, additional reporting by Nina Chestney in London, Terje Solsvik in Oslo; editing by Philip Blenkinsop and Alexander Smith)
