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Dive Brief:
- The U.S. International Trade Commission found in a Wednesday vote that U.S. solar manufacturing has been injured by imports of crystalline silicon photovoltaic cells from India, Indonesia and Laos, aligning with the Department of Commerce’s finding last month and setting up the Commerce Department to finalize anti-dumping and countervailing duty orders.
- “Duty margins are very substantial on all three countries,” said Wiley Rein partner Tim Brightbill, who represents the Alliance for American Solar Manufacturing and Trade, during a Wednesday press call. The alliance petitioned for the AD/CVD investigation. “For India, there were dumping margins of 123% for all producers, countervailing duty rates of 126%... We think those will be, and are, prohibitive rates.”
- The Alliance for American Solar Manufacturing and Trade is led by the U.S. solar manufacturers First Solar, Hanwha Qcells USA and Mission Solar Energy. Brightbill said the alliance expects the final AD/CVD orders will be issued by the Commerce Department on Nov. 2.
Dive Insight:
The ITC’s finding follows a 2023 determination from the ITC and the Commerce Department that manufacturers had operated in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam to dodge tariffs on Chinese-made solar components. Commerce set subsidy rates in that case, in 2025, which went as high as 3,403.96% for four Cambodian solar exporters.
With Wednesday’s finding, “what happens next is that orders will be issued by the Commerce Department, and the duties will be locked in, and that will formally close off this route that many Chinese-owned companies who had set up shop in Indonesia and Laos had used to get around the prior solar trade cases,” Brightbill said.
He noted that when new cases are successful, “we often see evasion attempts to evade duties or circumvent the duties ... Notably, Ethiopia is currently the third-largest source of solar imports, and imports from Ethiopia have surged more than 3,000% in the last 12 months.”
The alliance is alleging that “many of these Ethiopian imports are not actually manufactured there,” he said, and are instead “largely” Chinese-manufactured products that are seeking to circumvent existing tariffs on China and “engaging in whack-a-mole behavior and simply shifting operations.”
The alliance has an inquiry into those Ethiopian solar imports underway with the Commerce Department, Brightbill said.
Commerce Department import statistics show that the U.S. imported 232 million watts of solar cells in 2022, then 2 billion watts in 2024. In the same time frame, imports from Laos went from zero to 1.9 million watts.
Brightbill said during the press call that it is “too early to tell” if the Trump administration’s Section 232 tariff on polysilicon, which will go into effect Dec. 4, will end the need for further petitions with Commerce.
“We are hopeful that these Section 232 actions can help address the whack-a-mole problem, but I don't think we'll know for some time to come if we continue to see unfair trade practices that might need to be addressed. So we're monitoring very closely,” he said.
The solar industry has historically been divided on whether or not the government should take action against cheap solar imports. U.S. solar manufacturers have generally taken the position that it should, while clean energy groups and solar trade associations have opposed these petitions, saying that crackdowns on imports could create market uncertainty or “chill” the industry.
When the probe into imports from Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam was first announced in 2022, Heather Zichal, then-CEO of the American Clean Power Association, called the investigation a “disaster” that “effectively freezes development in the U.S. solar industry,” according to reporting from E&E News.
Brightbill noted in the Wednesday call that it is difficult for the U.S. to compete with China on the cost of solar components. “So we also need smart domestic policy that builds American manufacturing at scale, and we're starting to see that now on modules and cells,” he said.
The ITC said it will release its full report about the case on Nov. 23.