American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Backs up Commerce Data Selection in Solar Cell AD Review

The Commerce Department lawfully selected surrogate values, calculated rates, applied adverse facts, and correctly decided to deny a separate rate to exporter Trina during the eighth administrative review of the antidumping duty order on crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells from China, the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing said in its Sept. 18 brief at the Court of International Trade (Jinko Solar Import and Export Co. v. U.S., CIT # 22-00219).

The brief largely concurred with, and touched on, the same points as a brief filed the same day by DOJ (see 2309190038), but expanded on the issues of electricity valuation and Commerce's use of adverse facts.

Like in prior administrative reviews, Risen's unaffiliated suppliers of solar cells and modules failed to report their factors of production, the alliance said. Accurate valuation of those factors is required for Commerce to calculate Risen's dumping margin. Because of those reporting failures, the record was missing data for a significant percent of the solar cells and modules that Risen produced during the period of review, the alliance said. Commerce correctly found that Risen itself failed to cooperate by doing the maximum possible to obtain production data from its unaffiliated producers, and Commerce was within its discretion to use AFA to value the missing data, the alliance said.

On the issue of electricity valuation, the alliance said that the exhaustion principle required the court to reject Jinko Solar's argument on weight averaging peak and off-peak rates because Jinko never raised the "new claim" during the underlying review. Jinko was made aware of Commerce's surrogate value selection for electricity at the time of the preliminary results and did not raise the issue then, the alliance said.

The reply came in response to four separate motions for judgment filed in March by Risen and Jinko, two mandatory respondents, and intervenors Trina Solar and BYD (see 2303270050).