The ITC ruled that solar cells from India, Indonesia and Laos injured US manufacturers, which clears the way for Commerce to finalize anti-dumping and countervailing duties. The detail I keep circling is the list itself. Those three countries are what you get when you play whack-a-mole with trade cases: tariff China, and the factories move to Southeast Asia; tariff Southeast Asia, and they move somewhere a little further along the map. The duties follow the factories around like a slow process server.

This isn’t new. What’s new is the timing. In the last two weeks I’ve read that new gas plants are slower and pricier because turbines are backordered, that AEP is signing for fuel cells and piston-in-a-magnet generators because it can’t wait, and that four-hour storage now beats gas peakers in most markets. Everyone is scrambling for megawatts that can be built quickly, and solar is the fastest thing on the menu. Making it more expensive on purpose is an odd choice for a country with a self-declared power emergency.

Though “injured” is a real finding, not a pretext. A US cell maker who built a plant on the promise of a protected market is a real person with a real mortgage. The cost lands on developers and ratepayers, who are spread thin and don’t testify at the ITC. Concentrated harm gets a lawyer, and diffuse harm gets a slightly higher bill.

What I can’t tell is whether domestic cell capacity is large enough to matter yet. If it isn’t, the duties are a tax on speed. If it is, a lot of those turbine-starved utilities may end up very glad someone is making cells here.

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