High Panel Prices in USA

The US solar industry has been closely watching the solar panel case filed by two major solar panel manufacturers in USA (Suniva and Solarworld) to impose sharply higher prices on imports of solar panels. These two companies are looking beyond plain vanilla anti-dumping or safeguard duties but want to impose a blanket high price on imports of all solar cells and panels whatever may be the country of origin.

Both these western companies which have already filed for bankruptcy say that ADD only serves as a “whack a mole” measure with large Chinese solar panel companies like Jinko Solar, Trina Solar, Canadian Solar and others quickly setting up factories in other countries to escape the US ADD and bringing prices down. These companies have been hugely hurt by the sharp fall in solar panel prices in 2016 which made them totally uncompetitive in the market.

The USA solar industry is mostly against the imposition of Section 201 of the Trade Law which can impose high prices on imports if there is a case found by ITC that domestic products have been hurt due to massive cheap imports. There is little doubt that the Chinese have a mixture of subsidies, and their cheap manufacturing prowess almost completely wiped out all solar companies in the planet. The few that exist are mostly local and are surviving due to the ADD and MIP imposed on Chinese solar panels.

Europe, USA, Turkey are some of the countries which have imposed high ADD on imports and India is already considering imposing ADD to protect its domestic industry. Despite these protections, the Chinese companies have kept on winning market share as they are heavily supported by the Chinese economic system which has almost unlimited power in terms of providing cheap capital and subsidies to manufacturers.

With there being a significant chance that Trump administration imposing the law, the Asian companies are looking to hedge their bets in the world’s second largest solar panel market. Hanwha and LG are already looking at different sites to set up factories in case the law is actually passed and the panel prices of imports are doubled. Even some Chinese companies with major operations in the USA are looking at setting up manufacturing facilities. Though the cost of producing solar panels in

Though the cost of producing solar panels in the USA is quite high as compared to Asian locations, the super high prices of solar panel imports will make the factories competitive from the domestic USA market point of view. Though these factories will never be able to export products given the high cost of USA manufacturing, they would certainly be able to cater to the domestic market.

Most of the China-based makers that have surveyed factory sites in the US are unlikely to eventually build factories there because the high production costs in the US would cripple their price competitiveness, the sources indicated.