President Trump’s tariffs have stifled growth for large-sized solar arrays in the third quarter, the industry’s lead trade group reported Thursday.
The administration’s section 201 tariffs on solar panels “took a toll” on large utility-scale solar projects in the third quarter, the Solar Energy Industries Association said in releasing its third-quarter business report with the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
The tariffs were some of the first to be imposed by the Trump administration in 2018, targeting imports of solar panels and modules from Europe and Asia. The solar trade group had pressed the White House not to move forward with the protectionist measures, saying it would do harm to an industry that has been growing.
The market for smaller home-based solar projects, meanwhile, stabilized in the third quarter after suffering earlier damage from the tariffs, the report says. But it also projects that residential sales will be flat in 2018, as long as Trump’s tariffs remain in place.
“If not for the tariffs, the U.S. solar market would undoubtedly look better today than it does now,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, the solar energy group’s president and CEO. “However, as this report shows, this is a resilient industry that cannot be kept down for long. With smart policies in place, the potential for the solar industry is hard to overstate.”
The report shows that bigger utility projects have been delayed by the tariffs, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some growth to be had by the industry in the fourth quarter of 2018.
The report forecasts 3.5 gigawatts of utility solar panels being installed in the last quarter of the year, projecting the largest quarter for utility-size installations in two years.
Wood Mackenzie analysts expect many delayed projects to come online by the end of the year or in the first quarter of 2019.
The report also forecasts that the total number of installed U.S. solar panels coming online will more than double by 2023.
