The problem per se doesn’t seem to be the price of Chinese or Malaysian solar PV panels, but actual tax laws on the books that actually rewards Corporations to off shore manufacturing to ‘other’ countries. The so called “inverse tax” allows off shoring while giving the Corporate center still in the U.S. a tax write off which is what folks are complaining about when they say, “Billionaires pay less taxes than the middle class does.”

China’s cheap solar PV panels are just the tip of the iceberg, the supply chain of goods and services are coming from so many other countries that it has been pointed out by NERC, the spare parts for the national electric grid are for the most part sourced from other countries leaving the U.S. with an actual national security problem now and it is continuing on. The U.S. doesn’t have the manufacturing capacity for extremely large items like a nuclear plant output step up transformer, this has to be manufactured in Italy and shipped by boat to get the part to the U.S. about a one year process from start to finish. Accomplishing self reliance on one’s own solar PV and ESS moving towards energy self sufficiency and resilience is where one’s monies should be spent, don’t depend on the political/geopolitical dilatory response to social ills suffered now.

This tariff protectionism is fresh right now and it has proven to be restrictive to the application of solar PV installations in large construction projects like utility scale, medium scale like C&I installations and in the residential solar PV installation market. As before when one “protects” manufacturing interests in the U.S. with tariffs AND it fails like last time, you lose maybe 5,000 mostly automated solar PV plant employees. Due to the price increase of solar PV panels and ancillaries and BOM, one constricts construction of solar PV projects and can idle 200,000 installers and ancillary workforce personnel. So, is it a “good idea” to place a tariff on foreign solar PV panels and save “maybe” 5,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, but, increase costs and layoff 200,000 installers? That 40 to 1 ratio doesn’t make sense from an employment perspective, nor a tax base perspective.

Listen to Roberta. She knows what she is talking about!

Now the consumers are the victims. The path forward needs to be our are aggressive purchasing of their ‘below cost of production??’ solar panels at a substantial discount. At the same time the federal government needs to provide incentives for solar and semiconductor fabrication to return to the US. Let’s all not be stupid while we work through this global sourcing f##kup that was many years in the making. Let’s leverage all channels that are beneficial to the consumer. Solar is not going away and multiple replacement cycles are ahead. The US can and is the technology inovater and this is where we can win the long term strategic game.

Let’s get back to the job at hand and aggressively implement solar and wind energy strategies that are smart yet keeping our eye on the long-term plan.