antidumping duties

The US solar industry experienced project delays and cancellations when anti-dumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) tariff enforcement threatened supply in the past. Another round may be on the way soon, according to Roth Capital Partners.

Turkey’s total installed PV capacity reached 12.4 GW at the end of February. Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Alparslan Bayraktar says the country aims to add 3.5 GW of PV every year through to 2035.

Calls for barriers and duties are resurfacing in Europe as solar module prices sharply fall. German PV analyst Karl-Heinz Remmers recalls the 2009-13 period, when the European Union introduced anti-dumping and anti-subsidy duties. This drove the loss of 80,000 jobs in the solar industry, despite or perhaps because of the tariffs on PV modules and raw materials.

Auxin Solar filed the anti-circumvention petition against Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Cambodia, said an industry note from Philip Shen, managing director at ROTH Capital Partners.

The U.S. president issued a proclamation on Oct. 10 that cites the impact of imported bifacial panels on U.S. solar manufacturing, while also raising the scheduled fourth-year tariff rate from 15% to 18%.

India’s Solar Power Developers Association said that the one-year safeguard duty extension has already driven up capital costs. Any additional tariff barriers would jeopardize the Indian government’s “100 GW by 2022” target, it claimed.

The ‘safeguard’ duty will be levied on Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai solar cells – whether assembled into modules or not – at 14.9% from today and falling to 14.5% in six months’ time. Malaysian products are exempted as their imports have fallen dramatically since the duty was introduced, in July 2018.

The Indian government’s levy on modules could almost double to 40% within a year. Cells will see a similar rise, from an initial rate of 15%.