Trump may move to stop China's solar panel shell game

Houston Chronicle:

The Chinese solar panel industry, flooding U.S. markets with cheap solar panels, has a engaged in a musical chairs-type effort in recent years to avoid tariffs on their products by periodically shifting production to Malaysia, Thailand and other Southeast Asian nations.

So far, the U.S. government has held back on further tariffs as it has tried to balance the competing interests of American panel makers struggling to survive the Chinese onslaught against rooftop installers and solar farm developers that are prospering from cheap panels as they expand the nation's solar energy capacity. But the prospect that the pro-fossil fuel, "America first" President Donald Trump could upend the status quo has solar developers and environmentalists increasingly worried as the White reviews a series of trade and energy policies.
...

There is much more.

I find this case ironic since the Democrats who pushed the solar energy business claimed that it would not involve imports, but the US manufacturers just were not as competitive as those in Chinese companies despite all the boondoggles Democrats larded upon them.   The claim now is that tariffs on the Chinese manufacturers would destroy the solar business, such as it is.

One of the biggest problems for the solar business is that it lacks the capacity to modulate the flow of energy to meet demand.  It either supplies too little or in the case of California too much which requires the state to pay other states to take their excess.  They hope to solve this problem with large batteries but to date the costs of such batteries makes them even less competitive with traditional energy.