The International Trade Commission has paved the way for the Trump administration to impose steep tariffs on solar panel makers in southeast Asia, with duties hitting as high as 3,500%, in the United States’s latest effort to increase pressure on China. 

The trade group, which is responsible for establishing the legal basis for anti-dumping tariffs, issued an “affirmative determination” on Tuesday morning that four countries in southeast Asia have been receiving subsidies from China to dump products into the global market, hurting domestic solar panel makers. 

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The decision came roughly one month after the Department of Commerce unveiled tariff rates it intended to impose on Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

The tariffs stem from antidumping and countervailing duty investigations, which began under the Biden administration, focused on crystalline photovoltaic cells imported from these countries.

In April, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the tariffs would help boost domestic manufacturing and the U.S.’s competitiveness in the solar energy market.

Yet many U.S. solar developers, as opposed to manufacturers, have long relied on Asian imports to meet demand, meaning they could face pressure from the tariffs.

In 2024, the U.S. imported roughly $12.9 billion worth of solar equipment from the four Asian countries — roughly 77% of all U.S. module imports — according to calculations by BloombergNEF.

In order to impose the tariffs, the Trump administration needed the ITC to agree that the U.S. solar industry was harmed by the foreign nations dumping their products in the domestic market. 

Tuesday’s decision paved the way for the Department of Commerce to swiftly issue orders to implement the new tariffs, for which rates depend on the company and country. Cambodia will see the highest tariffs, approximately 3,521%. 

Jinko Solar products from Malaysia are set to see some of the lowest tariffs announced, with rates around 41.56%. Other modules from Vietnam and Thailand are facing rates between 120% and 400%.

Major solar trade groups have sounded the alarm over the tariff rates, with Solar Energy Industries Association President and CEO Abigail Ross Hopper saying they will raise the costs of solar products. 

“Today, U.S. solar cell manufacturing is growing for the first time in years, but it is still not at the scale needed to meet demand,” Hopper said. 

“This determination especially harms U.S. solar module producers that depend on access to imported solar cells as we ramp up domestic cell manufacturing capacity. Imposing additional tariffs on cell imports at this stage risks stalling progress and undermining the very industry they are meant to support,” she said.

While the rates are high, some analysts have said the new tariffs won’t be detrimental to solar energy development and deployment in the U.S. 

At the time the tariff rates were introduced, senior research analyst on Wood Mackenzie’s Power and Renewables team, Sagar Chopra, told the Washington Examiner that a large part of the existing supply chain had already begun to move away from the countries set to be hit by the tariffs. 

“We had seen [solar] module and cell imports already started to decline from a lot of these regions and pick up elsewhere,” Chopra said. 

“So instead of Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, we see cell imports or module imports increasing from places like India, Indonesia, and Laos,” he added.

As developers and manufacturers look to other countries for imports, Chopra said the tariffs will likely increase module costs, meaning the cost associated with the solar panels, which are made up of multiple cells. 

Wood Mackenzie estimated that module prices could jump between 8%-10% for manufacturers importing from these four countries by the third quarter of this year. The impact on overall costs is expected to be smaller, closer to 2-5%, as module prices only make up around 20-30% of the overall costs.

As a result, Chopra said, some manufacturers might be able to eat these costs and avoid passing them down to consumers, depending on the origin of their imports. 

“For example, Malaysia, I think the weighted tariff for the country was around 34% … so that’s a number that would easily be absorbed by some of the manufacturers, not necessarily passing on that percentage,” he said, later adding that no domestic developer or installers will be forced to pay the high rates seen on companies in Cambodia. 

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Chopra said the tariffs may crunch supply chains for domestic manufacturers and cause solar panel deployments to dip, particularly when combined with House Republicans’ efforts to roll back clean energy tax credits through the major tax and spending bill they are aiming to pass through the budget reconciliation process. He said he remains optimistic, though, that any pressure will only be felt in the short term. 

“I think the industry will adapt to these changes and absorb some of the cost, and I think essentially, it’s not a very big concern, or should not be a very big concern in the long term for the residential market,” he told the Washington Examiner.