The 30% solar tariff that US President Donald Trump has agreed to impose on imported solar modules and cells will cause the US solar industry to constrict by 11% over the next 5 years, causing nearly a quarter million customers to no longer install solar. It will hit the utility-scale solar sector the hardest.
You might think the new solar tariffs are about Suniva and SolarWorld Americas, but there’s a lot more going on in the background than meets the eye.
A group of 409 clean energy business leaders organized by independent environmental advocacy group E2 has penned a letter to US President Donald Trump opposing his recent decision to impose a 30% tariff on all imported solar cells and modules, warning that the move has the potential to eliminate almost 90,000 American jobs.
New analysis by GTM Research published a day after Donald Trump applied a 30% tariff on imported solar cells and modules shows that the US solar industry will see a 11% decrease in installations over the next 5 years, a reduction of around 7.6 gigawatts of installed solar between 2018 and 2022.
The recently announced 30% solar tariff could be offset and overwhelmed by new plans announced this week by the Rocky Mountain Institute and 35 solar energy industry leaders, which have committed to developing an ultra-low-cost solar product which could significantly reduce costs to the point that fully installed costs would only reach $0.50 per watt.
After 8 months of uncertainty and vitriol, US President Donald Trump has decided this week to impose a 30% tariff on imported solar cells and modules in response to a Section 201 trade case filed by Suniva and SolarWorld back in April of 2017, a move which will likely cost 23,000 American jobs this year.
Trump’s new solar tariff is bad news for thousands of PV workers in the US, but great news for workers in solar thermal, concentrating solar, building integrated solar, thin film solar, wind energy, geothermal and more…
International manufacturers sent twice as many solar cells and modules to the US in November 2017 as November 2016. Solar panel importers are looking to capitalize on the robust market fundamentals ahead of potential future tariffs, ArsTechnica reported.
Suniva and SolarWorld have filed a complaint with the US International Trade Commission claiming cheap solar cells and solar panels from China made it impossible for them to compete and drove them into bankruptcy. The claim is not about subsidies given to those companies by the Chinese government, only that the imported products are cheap and hurt Suniva’s and SolarWorld’s business. (Note that Suniva itself is a subsidiary of a Chinese solar company that opposed the complaint.)
The International Trade Commission has handed Trump just the tool he needs to crush the US solar power industry. Will he use it?
