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President Obama’s Commerce Department has announced some major tariffs on solar panels coming from China after the Interagency Trade Enforcement Center he put together discovered that some Chinese solar companies had been selling their product at below fair-market value. 60 companies, including the world’s largest panel maker Suntech Power Holdings Co., have been implicated and will have a 31% duty applied to their solar exports to the U.S. while the remainder of China’s solar panel exporters will have a 250% duty to pay on theirs.

The new tariffs are in addition to duties of up to 4.7% on Chinese imports put in place earlier this year by the Commerce Department due to illegal subsidies in the industry. While the Chinese largely ignored those tariffs, they won’t be able to do the same on duties of up to 250%. But since the tariffs are only on Chinese-made solar cells and not on solar panels, China could outsource cell production to another country to avoid paying the new fees. In 2011, they imported $3.1 billion worth of solar cells to the U.S. market, so it is a sure thing they will be looking for a way to keep that revenue flowing.

Some U.S. solar manufacturers are no doubt happy about the new tariffs, but solar installers and those interested in using solar at home may see the cost of doing so rise sharply in coming months. China controls about one half of the U.S. solar market and thus imported panels could soon be prohibitively expensive. Tony Clifford, a solar installer based in Maryland, said “Wow, this is upsetting” in a statement given to the L.A. Times, as he believes that a big reason more people have gone solar in the U.S. is due to the availability of cheaper solar panels from China. If those weren’t available to customers, growth in the solar industry could stall.

The new tariffs are expected to be implemented starting this fall, and only time will tell what effect it could have on the solar industry. If U.S. solar companies are better able to compete and can deliver more affordable solar products to interested consumers, the industry could benefit in the long-run from the additional tariffs on imported Chinese panels.

[via The Los Angeles Times]