While much has been made of the Trump administration’s fondness for fossil fuels over renewable energy, and the general uncertainty surrounding the president’s unpredictable policy directions that dissuaded investments into the energy transition to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, his administration has been fairly consistent in its prioritisation of security and self-reliance.

For the energy industry, this means reducing the US’ reliance on solar materials and components made overseas, through a combination of sticks—most often taking the form of anti-dumping and countervailing duties (AD/CVDs) and tariffs—and carrots—in the form of tax breaks for investing in manufacturing.

“45X kept its original 2032 phaseout timeline in the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) even as many of the tech-neutral demand-side credits wind down at the end of 2027,” Nasar told PV Tech Premium earlier this year. “That’s a strong signal that support for domestic clean energy manufacturing is durable and bipartisan and provides more certainty for manufacturers for site cell and module capacity than developers might have assumed a year ago.”

While PV Tech Premium heard from Intertek CEA earlier this year that the policy landscape is not universally to the benefit of US solar—Section 232 rules, in particular, would be unlikely to “incentivise additional US cell factories”—the overall picture includes causes for optimism; Anza president Aaron Hall told us that Section 232 is a “very strong domestic manufacturing policy”.

PV Tech Research head of market research Moustafa Ramadan commented at the time that, for wafer manufacturing in particular, the case for building more domestic wafer manufacturing has been strengthened by this year’s policy changes.

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