The solar energy industry’s string of record-breaking years is about to face a challenge in the form of a White House poised to pull back the subsidies that have helped it boom.But most analysts say the industry can weather those potential setbacks. Electricity demand is growing, the cost of deploying solar continues to come down, and there’s more domestic panel manufacturing. Those big trend lines, they say, may Trump-proof solar power, at least in the short term. “Solar didn’t disappear eight years ago,” said Edurne Zoco, who leads the clean technology and renewables team at S&P Global Commodity Insights. “We’re still bullish about the industry’s outlook.”S&P’s forecast predicts that the United States will install 45,000 megawatts of solar in 2025, part of a whopping 586,000 MW installed worldwide. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, meanwhile, forecasts that solar power generation will grow 75 percent between 2023 and 2025, with generating capacity even exceeding wind by the end of 2025.A quarterly report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie released in November found that the U.S. was on pace to install a record 40,500 MW in 2024, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all generating capacity added to the grid through the third quarter.That growth, however, has been buoyed by a friendly policy environment. The Biden administration has unleashed tax credits and loans through the Inflation Reduction Act to bolster solar installations, and has opened up federal lands to vast new projects. The Trump administration has vowed to scale back the climate law and is poised to ramp up trade barriers that could make solar more expensive.Here are the trends that will shape the solar industry in 2025 and beyond.After years of using incentives to build up a domestic solar manufacturing base to compete with cheap Chinese imports, the Biden administration in 2024 turned to a more punitive agenda. A series of tariff decisions jacked up prices of imported solar parts from China and other Asian countries, covering almost the full range of solar components.That’s not expected to change under President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised to add 10 percent tariffs on goods from China and has said he’d raise the prices of imported goods from other countries.Limiting imports could be a mixed bag for solar’s outlook. A key reason the Biden administration did not enact more punitive tariffs early — and put a two-year moratorium on solar duties that expired in June last year — was because the cheap equipment was getting panels on the grid. As late as 2023, as much as 80 percent of the solar equipment installed in the U.S. was imported, and U.S. Census Bureau data showed imports had increased year over year at the start of 2024.A Wood Mackenzie analysis in October predicted that domestically produced solar cells would cost about 41 cents per watt in 2025 and decline to 35 cents by 2032, compared with
Ven. Gen 10th, 2025
