Letter to Hon. Joe Biden, President of the United States - Rosen Leads Letter to President Biden in Opposition to Extending Job-Killing Solar Tariffs

Letter

Dear Mr. President,

We write to request that you allow the Section 201 tariffs currently imposed on imported solar panels and cells to lapse. At a minimum, we ask that you retain the Section 201 tariff exclusion for bifacial solar panels and not apply the tariffs to imported solar cells. Such actions will support good-paying jobs in the clean energy sector here in the United States and promote investments in clean, renewable energy at a time when our nation and our environment need them most.

As you know, in February 2018, the Trump Administration imposed Section 201 tariffs on imported crystalline silicon solar panels and solar cell imports above an annual 2.5-gigawatt tariff rate quota. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), this led to the loss of more than 62,000 American clean energy jobs and 10.5 gigawatts of foregone solar deployment. The Section 201 tariffs are currently set to expire on February 6, 2022, and we believe that extending the tariffs will do nothing but add unnecessary costs to U.S. consumers, hurt American solar jobs, and artificially stymie the deployment of otherwise viable solar projects in the United States.

We fully support efforts to promote domestic manufacturing throughout the solar supply chain. However, it will take time to achieve this worthwhile policy objective, as current domestic production only meets 15% of the U.S. solar demand. We will need to utilize global supply chains, free of forced labor, to meet our clean energy and job creation goals while we expand our domestic solar production capacity. In the meantime, continued tariffs will hurt the nearly 90% of workers in the domestic solar industry who work in non-manufacturing jobs, from installation and maintenance to operations, distribution, and development.

For these reasons, we respectfully ask that you not renew the Section 201 tariffs on solar panels and cells. If you ultimately decide to extend the tariffs, we ask that you preserve the exclusion for bifacial solar panels and not apply the duties to imported cells, in order to help lower input costs for domestic panel manufacturers.

Thank you in advance for your consideration, and we look forward to working with you to bolster the nation's clean energy sector and create good-paying jobs here in the United States.

Sincerely,