BREAKING: Bifacial beats Trump’s tariffs - SolarStar

Other products applied for exclusion, but in this ruling USTR declined to exclude 72 cell or greater products, or those without busbars or gridlines, suggested that they were unlikely to revisit this. The ruling does excludes flexible fiberglass solar panels with output from 250-900 watts from the Section 201 tariffs, those with spacing greater than 10 mm between the individuals cells filled by optical film.

The effect will be blunted for for large projects with long construction timetables, but there is probably a developer on the phone right now, who sees a chance to change products getting put on a boat somewhere because the savings could be relatively substantial. A module that cost 25¢-35¢ per watt pre-tariff, will now save 6¢ to 9¢/W in the U.S. market by switching to bifacial. For developers seeing all-in pricing around $1 per watt-DC, a system price decrease on this level is significant.

Large scale developers have a large delivery window is that can be years long – for instance the Palen Solar Project, in its filings with the Bureau of L Management, suggested that solar modules would take 22 full months to be delivered to the site via more than 8,000 truck deliveries (above image). These modules, if delivery had begun this month, would first save 25% through early February 2020, then 20% 15% as the tariff declines each year.

As these groups are already going all in on single axis trackers that are specifically designed to make use of bifacial modules, it could be that utility-scale product shifts will be limited, as the market has already shifted to greater adoption of bifacial technology.

Given that bifacial solar modules can often be found at a similar price point as stard solar modules, one might think that developers would purchase whatever product is cheapest even when you won’t get all of the bifacial benefit. We should expect to see some cannibalization of the market for stard solar modules.

However, this can only go so far. First off, manufacturing lines of certain product types can only change so fast, secondly glass on glass bifacial modules don’t fit in the stard module supply chain as easily as their physical structure requires different installation hardware.

There is a chance that this legal change can be taken advantage of in manufacturing lines if Dupont can deliver its clear backsheet product to manufacturers who have dedicated lines selling stard solar modules to the United States, as most solar modules have some bifaciality to them.