The US federal government has withdrawn its appeal against a US Court of International Trade (CIT) ruling requiring Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to retroactively collect two years of tariffs on imported solar panels.
The US Court of Appeals has granted the dismissal and the appeal will be pursued solely by trade associations, panel manufacturers and US developers, including the American Clean Power Association, the Solar Energy Industries Association, and companies such as BYD, Canadian Solar, JA Solar, JinkoSolar, Trina Solar and NextEra Energy. With the federal government no longer a defendant, the remaining parties will bear their own legal costs.
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In August 2025, a CIT ruling found that the Biden administration’s two-year moratorium on collecting antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) tariffs on solar imports was unlawful. This meant that US solar companies could be liable to pay retroactive duties on solar products imported from Southeast Asia between June 2022 and June 2024. In October 2025, the retroactive collection of duties was temporarily suspended while the appeal was under consideration. At the time, experts estimated that the duties could run into the “billions”.
In 2022, US authorities investigated several Chinese solar manufacturers on suspicion that they were circumventing trade restrictions by shifting parts of their supply chains to Southeast Asia and exporting panels to the US. AD/CVD tariffs were applied, but the Biden administration introduced a moratorium designed to give domestic solar manufacturing time to expand capacity and to ensure a steady supply of solar panels for US electricity generation after Commerce’s investigations effectively halted imports from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Cambodia. The moratorium allowed panels to enter the US between 1 April 2022 and 6 June 2024 without paying the tariffs.
However, California-based solar panel assembler Auxin Solar, which brought the initial AD/CVD case to Commerce, brought the case to the CIT, arguing that President Biden’s June 2022 executive order pausing tariff collection was “an abuse of discretion.”
The CIT’s decision cleared the way for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to begin collecting duties on imports from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia that entered the country under the moratorium.
With the federal government withdrawing from the case, Auxin will have 40 days to file its response once the remaining defendants have submitted their opening briefs in March. A hearing is expected later this year.
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