Comments on: Biden says four more years of imported solar panel tariffs, but bifacial get free pass

By: Marian De Luna

Marian De Luna — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:47:00 +0000

The government have already made calculations and found out that domestic manufacturers aren’t producing enough due to production capacity. I won’t be surprised if the government already bought a billion solar panels from China while the price is on all time low.

By: James Borkowski

James Borkowski — Thu, 12 May 2022 00:14:51 +0000

Solar home installation in Australia is booming. Average cost $5-10K, less with rebates, payback in 2.5-5 years. Currently over 30% of homes there have solar and it’s growing quickly. Compare that with the US. even in states sun states like Arizona. What is wrong here?

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 22:55:13 +0000

Where is the revenue from the tariff going? Is it allocated to building more domestic production?

At a certain point given the known domestic demand for panels, why can’t we make them here? Semi conductor companies are coming back?

Lastly, the stuff about a 14% tariff killing jobs is overblown. $0.03 per kw difference is not meaningful especially in Commercial and Residential mkts. Even in Utility scale it is only a few % difference.

The much bigger deal is getting Federal government to keep ITC longer. Focus on what is important

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 14:40:54 +0000

All this Tariff stuff is pure garbage politics. Allow Bifacial but not Mono-facial? That tells me this is nothing more than lip service from politicians to voters. Zero impact (no help) to the US Solar manufacturing group. But hey, keep importing product that is supported by Forced Labor. Hope you sleep good at night.

By: Nathan G Roberts

Nathan G Roberts — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 23:36:13 +0000

Per the National Solar Job Census of 2016 (National Solar Jobs Census – The Solar Foundation), of the 260,000 workers in the solar industry in the US, 38,000 of them (about 15%), are in manufacturing, and a smaller fraction (not specifically broken out in the study) actually are manufacturing modules and cells subject to the tariffs. I would guess conservatively that about 1/4% of that, or maybe 10,000 people are involved in manufacturing cells and modules. The rest of those manufacturing jobs are producing other components – inverters, racking, combiner boxes, monitoring equipment, etc. So, this tariff theoretically might help about 4% of the workers in the solar industry in the US.

What this tariff actually does is raise the price of solar modules for everyone, which will shrink the market (estimates are at 10–20% loss of market size), hurting all of those 250,000+ workers not involved in cell or module manufacturing, and hurting consumers who will have to pay more for solar electricity. Estimates are at 20,000 to 30,000 job losses this year due to the tariff (President’s Decision on Solar Tariffs is a Loss for America | SEIA).

This tariff will not bring significantly more solar module manufacturing to the US, for many reasons. One reason is that the 4 year time horizon for the tariff, along with the annual step down, is not enough time or certainty for companies to invest the capital necessary to build plants here. By the time they started to see meaningful results, the tariffs will be gone.

But, even if it does generate some new solar manufacturing capacity, the solar industry is going to shrink, demand is going to go down, and everyone is going to have to lower their prices. The 2 US-based companies, SolarWorld and Suniva (which are actually both majority foreign owned) that initiated this trade case have zero chance of being able to compete and be profitable even with tariffs at this level. They are already gone, and not coming back.

The US solar industry is not a manufacturing industry. It is a development, finance, engineering, design, construction, sales, marketing, and service industry. And all those hard working American folks get hurt by the tariff.

By: Solarman

Solarman — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 22:50:22 +0000

“And with no domestic solar cell manufacturers, all U.S. module makers must import crystalline silicon solar cells.”

There’s the bottom line, the supply chain is still China heavy and out of the U.S. manufacturer’s control. This bifacial announcement has pretty much been settled in the appeals courts, even before Trump left office. The announcement of a CAP change from 2.5GW to 5.0GW on imported cells used by ‘domestic’ panel manufacturers, is still China heavy on the foundry and cell manufacturing needed for a U.S. supply chain.

On the bifacial solar PV panel pass on tariffs, before the Pandemic I believe bifacial solar PV panels were selling in Manufacturing lots of something like 100,000 and up around $0.29/watt. Now China can do what they’re famous for, take large manufacturing run production and sell it for $0.20/watt, maybe less. Which gives companies like Longi, Yingli, Talesun and several others that have been selling in the European Union a leg up in the solar PV market Worldwide.