OPIS Insights

Watch: Barron’s Senior Energy Writer Laura Sanicola and OPIS Senior Editor of US Solar Colt Shaw discuss what’s ahead for energy this week.

Watch this week’s episode for insights into the state of the U.S. solar market, especially the fallout for importers in the wake of a recent court decision on solar tariffs and how this could affect solar manufacturers going forward.

Transcript:

LAURA SANICOLA: Hi, everyone. This is Laura Sanicola, author of Barron’s Energy Insider, and I’m here today with Colt Shaw, senior editor for US Solar at OPIS. Colt, thanks for joining me.

COLT SHAW: Of course. Thanks for having me back.

SANICOLA: So I figured it was about time for a solar update. A U.S. court recently overturned President Biden’s pause on solar tariffs and said that duties on imported panels must be collected retroactively, in some cases, as high as 250 percent. Can you just give us a rundown of what this means for the solar industry and investors right now, especially in the U.S.?

SHAW: Yeah. Well, at a high level, it basically means anyone who acted as an importer of record for module imports from Southeast Asia from 2022 to 2024, June of those years, is on the hook here. It gets a little bit more complicated than that just because I think, basically, the industry was so preoccupied this year with IRA tax credit modifications and all these concurrent trade probes.

So I think this kind of came out of nowhere, and I think the industry has kinda spent the last month grappling with exactly the fallout. I think there’s some sense that maybe big corporations are a little bit more insulated or have some more kind of mitigation efforts at their disposal. But, definitely, some companies are going to be in hot water and scrambling to kinda figure out exactly what this means.

So I think finally, after about a month, we’re seeing some kind of organized appeal. I think this week, I believe a couple days ago, American Clean Power Association joined with some panel manufacturers to kind of officially file an appeal and move that forward. So we’ll see where that goes. There might be some kind of legislative effort, just because we’re talking, like, 54 billion dollars, according to one estimate I’ve seen. So it’s a huge deal, and I think the industry is kind of still putting its head together to figure out the exact way to kind of mitigate the fallout.

SANICOLA: So when we think of the companies that could benefit from the situation, you know, top of mind, First Solar is the only U.S. solar manufacturer that’s publicly listed. How how are they impacted and how are others in a similar situation impacted?

SHAW: Yeah. It’s tough to say kind of off the bat because I believe sales were impacted as well. So, you know, domestic assemblers who were bringing in sales from Southeast Asia as they kind of ramp up their own U.S. assembly plants could be on the hook for these tariffs as well. But I would say long term it’s another kind of barrier thrown up against imports from Southeast Asia, and just kind of adds to the risk and uncertainty, that I think a lot of domestic assemblers are kind of relying on, as they try to attract more customers for, frankly, modules that have a pretty steep premium.

But as these kind of tariff investigations and additional retroactive tariffs pile up, we kind of artificially raise the price, to where, you know, it’s not that much more of a leap to just pay a few more cents per watt in order to avoid the threat of tariffs hitting two years later or retroactive tariffs from an anti-dumping probe. So, I think long term, they’re kind of looking at using the stick rather than the carrot in terms of repositioning US solar manufacturing.

And I think this is kind of the latest in that, but we’ll see how it plays out once the actual appeal works its way through the courts. I don’t expect anyone to immediately start writing checks. I think there’s probably gonna be kind of a concerted pushback to this.

SANICOLA: Alright. Thanks so much, Cole, and thanks everyone for joining. We’ll see you next week.