Washington Watch: Trump Attacks Solar Industry with Tariff

Donald Trump last week attacked the solar industry with a 30% tariff on imported solar panels.

It probably should not come as a surprise that Trump, the champion of oil and coal, chose solar energy as the target for implementing some of his anti-China campaign rhetoric. He announced last week that he was imposing a 30% tariff on imported solar cells and modules.

While he claimed that the action was to benefit solar manufacturing in the United States, solar industry and other financial analysts estimate that the move will actually cost 23,000 American jobs this year. Higher-cost panels are expected to add 3 to 10 per cent to the cost of installing new solar facilities, thereby reducing solar installation jobs. Other jobs are expected to be lost in American industries which make other parts here for use in solar installations.

Even the language of the findings by Trump’s Office of the U.S. Trade Representative underscores the likely negative impact on the growth of American solar energy capacity: “From 2012 to 2016, the volume of solar generation capacity installed annually in the United States more than tripled, spurred on by artificially low-priced solar cells and modules from China.” It’s noteworthy that this leading finding appeared to reference the tripling of United States’ solar electricity generation as a negative.

The U.S. solar industry also received strong support in its opposition to the tariff from economic conservatives and free-market backers. In these conservatives’ views, solar business is business, tariffs impede business, and international trade is a good thing.

Opposition to tariffs targeting the solar industry has proven to be one of those rare points of agreement between environmentalists and conservative ‘think tanks’ like the Heritage Foundation: Trump is bad for solar business.

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