Scott Lincicome, Chad Smitson, and Eli DeLuca
In the seventh major solar trade action under the fourth legal authority in 15 years, the Trump administration has announced Section 232 “national security” tariffs and price floors for polysilicon and its downstream “derivatives,” including solar panels (modules) and the cells that go into them. It is the latest entry in the unfortunate and unsurprising saga of US solar protectionism, which has now spanned two decades with little to show for it.
Let’s recap:
Following the failure of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s solar subsidies to boost the American solar industry, the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing successfully petitioned the government in 2011 for anti-dumping and countervailing duties (AD/CVDs) on Chinese solar imports, which initially ranged from 23.75 to 254.66 percent.
China retaliated by imposing 53–57 percent duties on US polysilicon, effectively crippling the then-thriving domestic polysilicon industry. In 2014, the AD/CVDs were expanded to include Taiwanese imports after domestic producers alleged that Chinese manufacturers had shifted production there to dodge the 2011–2012 duties. This struggle continued into 2018, when the US industry successfully secured Section 201 safeguard tariffs on global solar imports and additional Section 301 tariffs on Chinese solar products, including polysilicon. In 2021, an anonymous industry group calling itself “American Solar Manufacturers Against Chinese Circumvention” filed a circumvention petition against several Southeast Asian countries. After the Department of Commerce rejected the petition because the group refused to disclose members’ identities, Auxin Solar, a California solar manufacturer, filed a petition in early 2022 with the same request. Commerce acted on this one by subjecting those exporters to the same rates as China in the 2012 order, set to take effect in June 2024. In 2022, the US government enacted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which funneled billions in new subsidies to US solar producers and installers—subsidies that were also protectionist, thanks to rules favoring “local content” over imports. Also in 2022, the Biden administration extended the Section 201 duties but suspended the anti-circumvention duties that were now pending, because the domestic solar industry could not meet domestic demand and US officials feared the high duties would thwart the solar power buildout being subsidized by the IRA. In 2024, the Biden administration extended the Section 301 tariffs while further hiking the rates on Chinese polysilicon and wafers. In 2025, the US industry secured new AD/CVD orders—and high duties—on imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, and the industry petitioned for another investigation on solar imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos. In each case, the industry’s claim was the same as before: Chinese companies moved their manufacturing to low-cost countries that weren’t subject to US duties, and American companies couldn’t compete with the flood of solar imports from these sources. Also in 2025, the now-Republican government passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, canceling some of the IRA’s solar subsidies. In fact, on day one of the administration, solar was excluded from expedited permitting. Only one solar project was approved on federal land in Trump’s first year, none following Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s requirement for his personal sign-off. In a Truth Social post, President Trump went so far as to declare solar and wind energy to be “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY.” He announced that “we will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar.” (Yes, it is odd that the same administration now claiming that solar manufacturing is a “national security” issue deems it a “scam” and just canceled a load of US solar subsidies and projects.) Now in 2026 we get the Section 232 tariffs, which replace and expand the global Section 201 tariffs that expired earlier this year, along with new price controls to effectively ban low-priced solar imports from entering the United States.To recap: that’s seven trade actions in 15 years, each one expanding on the last. We’ve had targeted trade and global actions and billions in subsidies too. The effective tariff rate on solar imports (including the effectively-global Section 301 forced labor tariffs) is now almost 100 percent, while producers’ chief input, polysilicon, was almost duty-free. Solar panel prices in the United States are now, per Bloomberg, “more than double the global average.” Yet the solar manufacturing industry here still hasn’t boomed and still wants more import protection.
The Trump administration’s new Section 232 action effectively admits that the previous tariff fixes haven’t done the trick. Their obvious “solution”: even more tariffs (and mind-numbingly complex price controls that, as the American Action Forum’s Jacon Jensen details, will ensure even higher US solar energy prices), with the import protection stack now running across the entire solar supply chain that includes silicon metal, polysilicon, wafers, cells, and modules (panels).
There are strong reasons to doubt the domestic industry will boom now. For starters, the new import restrictions and price floors for solar inputs will increase domestic producers’ costs, which, as seen in Figure 2 from BloombergNEF, were already far higher (as of early 2026) than anywhere else in the world.
High tariffs on cells and module imports, meanwhile, will contribute to the doubling of the cost per watt for these solar products in the United States:
Put together, these measures are sure to fuel “demand destruction,” as sky-high prices discourage US solar installations, which had already declined 14 percent year-over-year in 2025. A smaller US market for solar will, in turn, mean a smaller, weaker US solar industry—one that, much like the highly protected, high-cost, and still-shriveling domestic shipbuilding industry, can only operate behind a massive tariff wall.
Given Trump’s public antipathy toward solar power, one could be forgiven for wondering whether this is just the outcome he intended.
