Billions in U.S. Solar Projects Shelved After Steep Solar Panel Tariff by Trump Administration

By Edward Leano, Christian Post Contributor Friday, June 08, 2018

A new tariff on imported solar panels, enacted by the Trump administration, has prompted companies in the U.S. to put on hold large-scale installation projects of more than $2.5 billion. Thousands of jobs are now also affected, according to renewable energy developers.

The loss in potential investments is more than twice the $1 billion that companies have planned to spend on expanding local solar panel production to take advantage of the market now cleared of competition by the import tax, as Reuters pointed out.

President Donald Trump has announced the tariff earlier this January, pushing through with a 30 percent tariff that the administration plans to retain for four years, with a scheduled decrease of 5 percent per year over that span of time. It was a policy that was protested by solar power developers, citing that the new tax would freeze what would have been one of the fastest-growing industries in America.

Renewable energy firms, before the import tax, have put up utility-scale installations worth a total of $6.8 billion last year, not counting the other smaller scale projects for commercial and home use, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Power tax incentives combined with falling prices of imported panels have resulted in what could have been a solar boom, according to Zoe Hanes, chief executive of Charlotte, North Carolina solar developer Pine Gate Renewables.

"Solar was really on the cusp of being able to completely take off," Hanes said, as quoted by CNBC.

Cypress Creek Renewables, one of the biggest utility-scale solar developers in the country, said that they have shelved or canceled around $1.5 billion in projects that would have put up solar facilities in Texas, Colorado, and the Carolinas. The 30 percent tariff simply made it impossible for the projects to compete, according to a company representative.

That meant about 150 projects are now frozen or postponed when they should have provided three thousand jobs or more. The same goes for McCarthy Building Companies, which has just slashed plans to employ around 1,200 people for their solar projects this year.

It's now a choice for solar installers to let go of projects or try to make ends meet despite the costs. "Either you make the decision to default or you bite the bullet and you make less money," Bret Sowers, vice president of development and strategy for Southern Current, said about their difficult choices for about $1 billion worth of projects in South Carolina and elsewhere.

While installers are troubled, domestic manufacturing has been boosted by the tariff in the meantime. These companies, however, are not necessarily creating a lot of new jobs in the process. "The factories are highly automated," Martin Pochtaruk, president of Heliene which is now opening a U.S. facility, said about their new investment.

"You don't employ too many humans. There are a lot of robots," he added.