US Imposes Steep Tariffs on Southeast Asian Solar Equipment Imports

• New duties on solar cells and modules from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam—covering 80 % of US imports—aim to bolster domestic manufacturing but raise project costs.

The United States has cleared the final hurdle to levy heavy tariffs on solar cells and modules arriving from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, a region that supplied nearly four-fifths of American panel demand last year. In a unanimous decision, the US International Trade Commission ruled that the low-priced imports are injuring domestic manufacturers, unlocking penalty rates calculated by the Commerce Department that in some cases exceed 3,000 %.

The trade case—pursued by a coalition that includes Hanwha Q Cells and First Solar—differs from the blanket duties imposed under the Trump administration. After more than a year of data gathering, Commerce concluded that factories in the four Southeast Asian nations benefited from unfair subsidies and sold panels in the US below production cost. Cambodia, which withdrew from the probe, received the harshest headline rate of 3,521 %, while average duties were set at 396 % for Vietnam, 375 % for Thailand, and 34 % for Malaysia. Collections will begin in June.

Industry advocates for the tariffs celebrated the ruling. “This is a decisive victory for US manufacturing,” said Tim Brightbill, counsel for the petitioning companies, arguing that even generous tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act could not offset a flood of cut-price imports. First Solar’s shares rose 1.4 % after the vote.

Project developers warned that higher equipment prices could slow the clean-energy build-out, noting that the four targeted countries shipped roughly USD 13 billion in panels to the US last year. Yet the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition downplayed the threat, pointing to labor costs, interconnection delays, and financing hurdles that dwarf panel prices in modern budgets. “Equipment is now a small slice of the total,” said Mike Carr, the group’s executive director, adding that domestic output should be sufficient to meet national demand by 2026.

Even so, the ruling intensifies a policy tug-of-war. House Republicans are seeking to trim federal climate incentives, and developers already face uncertainty over possible future duties on other sources of imported solar components. For now, the ITC’s decision signals that Washington is willing to accept short-term cost spikes in exchange for accelerating a home-grown solar supply chain—an industrial gamble that will play out project by project over the next several years.