By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
Though North Carolina will bear the overwhelming brunt of Cypress Creek Renewables’ decision to cancel 1.5 GW of projects in the wake of the Trump Administration’s tariff imposition, it isn’t the only one.
In all, 11 states will feel the sting of what company spokesman Jeff McKay called the “lost investment opportunity” that will result from its pullback.
“We’re projecting that the tariff will cost into the billions of dollars in lost investments,” McKay told SolarWakeup. “It’s no secret that the solar industry’s record rate of growth will be harmed by the tariff. We aren’t the only ones pulling back.”
The company has been looking at projects since last year to determine whether they are still economically viable under the new tariff regime, McKay said. Then the company acted to reduce the number of marginal projects in its pipeline.
The biggest state affected was North Carolina, but there are other states that will see noticeable effects, including:
“We now have some projects due to the price sensitivities around utility-scale solar that no longer have a clear path forward,” McKay said. “That means that we a substantial amount of lost investment opportunities. That’s translates into jobs that won’t be created and new tax revenue that communities will not receive.”
The news comes as Bloomberg reported earlier this week that “Republican senators from five states with big solar farms are asking the Trump administration to exempt the workhorse of industrial solar panels from tariffs imposed earlier this year.”
Exempting utility-scale solar modules from the tariffs doesn’t really solve the overall problem, which is that the duties have cost 9,800 downstream installation and other non-manufacturing jobs, as well as having thrown the industry into chaos for the past year and a half. And it bears repeating that the tariffs were imposed on the whims of two companies that, in short order, will no longer exist.
But the exemption might be a good step toward fixing this unforced error that is harming the overall U.S. economy.
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