President Trump said in a proclamation that he would eliminate a loophole granted by his administration that has allowed certain imported solar panels to avoid tariffs.
The White House has sought to claw back the exemption for bifacial, or two-sided, solar panels granted by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer in 2019. At the time, bifacial panels were a specialized product, but one that the tariffs had prompted some U.S. manufacturers to begin developing.
In the proclamation on Saturday, Trump said the exclusion “has impaired and is likely to continue to impair the effectiveness” of the original tariff action intended to boost U.S. manufacturing.
In addition, Trump said that tariffs scheduled to fall from 20% to 15% in their fourth year will instead be set at 18%.
The directive is the latest effort by the White House to close a loophole that has allowed U.S. solar developers to import bifacial panels tariff-free since 2019.
The White House had intended to issue the proclamation earlier in the week, envisaging an event at First Solar in Ohio, plans thwarted by Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis and subsequent hospitalization, an industry source said.
In July, senior officials from the National Economic Council, Vice President Mike Pence’s office, the Department of Commerce, the National Security Council, and White House Trade and Manufacturing Director Peter Navarro’s office met at the White House to discuss the issue but were left feeling “defeated” when a representative from Lighthizer’s office failed to show up.
“Everyone was like, ‘Yep, we really need to do something. We’ve really got to unring this bell. We’ve got to fix this,’” a source with knowledge of the discussion told the Washington Examiner at the time.
Backlash from a major industry trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association, came swiftly.
“The Trump administration decision this weekend to expand solar tariffs and evaluate an extension of those tariffs counters critical needs of our country right now, jeopardizing jobs, economic recovery in the face of a pandemic, and a clean environment,” SEIA President and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper said in a statement. The organization will “evaluate every option to reverse this harmful approach,” Hopper said.
Under Trump, the White House has sought to bolster U.S. manufacturing by targeting China, which dominates solar panel manufacturing.
In early 2018, Trump approved four years of tariffs on solar panels beginning at 30% in the first year and set to decline by 5% each year thereafter.
