Several changes made to federal policies that affect the US solar sector under the Trump administration have been met with caution or concern by many in the sector.
Earlier this month, for instance, the government introduced new 15% tariffs on polysilicon and minimum prices for a number of solar components under the Section 232 legislation. While the stated ambition of many of these trade policies has been to reduce US reliance on foreign suppliers, PV Tech Premium heard from Intertek CEA that “the case for US polysilicon, ingot, and wafer capacity remains limited,” as the imposition of hostile trade policies will not single-handedly build a domestic manufacturing supply chain in the US.
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However, the issue is not entirely clear-cut. Last week, PV Tech Premium spoke to Hasan Nazar, head of policy at Crux, who was optimistic that the US’ successful expansion of its downstream manufacturing sector—particularly for modules, which he said saw an increase in manufacturing capacity of over 700% in three years—will translate to a stronger business case for upstream manufacturing.
“Having worked in a full end-to-end supply chain manufacturing company before, what I can say is that there is merit in incentivising the end-use production,” he said. “That necessarily means it makes way more sense to continue to onshore upstream [manufacturing]; the more modules that are being produced in the US, the more economic sense it makes to make more cells in the US.
“It is a long-tail story, if you want to create a strategic onshore supply chain, and we’re in the middle of that.”
He also noted that the policy changes made by the Trump administration’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) do not represent an existential threat to US solar manufacturing, saying that the act “didn’t kill” the crucial 45X advanced manufacturing tax credit.
“It’s important to note that the OBBBA didn’t kill the 45X advanced manufacturing credit,” he said. “The tech-neutral credits [cut short by the OBBBA] are deployment credits that are provided to offtakers to reduce the cost of adoption, but the production and supply-side credits for solar remained intact.”
“They remained on the same timeline; the difference—and there are new conditions that have been applied—relates to demonstrating that the supply chains are not tied to largely Chinese-controlled entities to qualify.”
Read our full interview with Nazar here.
The US policy landscape will be a topic of discussion at our annual PV CellTech conference in San Francisco on 13-14 October 2026. For the full agenda and details on booking, click here.
