The two-year moratorium on solar circumvention duties expired on June 6. It was not extended.
For most project owners the immediate effect is on what you buy next. But there is a second effect, on equipment you have already bought, that is getting almost no attention and that carries a hard deadline about six months out.
Presidential Proclamation 10414 suspended collection of antidumping and countervailing duties on cells and modules from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam for 24 months. That window closed on June 6, 2024.
Modules entering now from producers Commerce found to be circumventing, without adequate certification, carry the underlying Chinese duty rates. Reported exposure exceeds 200 percent. That is not a cost increase to be absorbed. It is a number that ends a project.
Suppliers that were found not to be circumventing, or that have reconfigured their manufacturing and can certify accordingly, are not affected in the same way. As we wrote last September, this is a supplier-by-supplier diligence question, not a country-level one.
This is the part to act on.
Modules that entered the United States duty-free under the moratorium were admitted on a condition: they must be “utilized,” meaning used or installed in the United States, within 180 days after the emergency period ends. With the period having ended June 6, that puts the utilization deadline in roughly early December 2024.
Commerce has been specific about what fails the test. Merchandise that remains in inventory or a warehouse after the deadline, is resold to another party, is subsequently exported, or is destroyed after importation is not considered utilized. The consequence of failing is a retroactive cash deposit rate of up to 254 percent, assessed against the importer of record.
If you have modules on a rack in a yard right now that came in under the moratorium, you have approximately six months to get them installed. Not delivered to site. Installed.
In our experience the exposure clusters in three places.
Projects that slipped for interconnection reasons. This is the most common. Equipment was procured on a schedule that assumed a utility timeline, the utility timeline moved, and the modules have been sitting since. The utilization rule does not care why the project slipped.
Public agency projects caught in procurement or approval cycles. A district that bought modules ahead of a board approval, or that has been working through a bid protest or a CEQA question, may be holding equipment it cannot yet install.
Owners who stockpiled deliberately. Some buyers purchased ahead during the moratorium as a hedge against exactly the expiration we are now in. Warehoused inventory is the specific behavior the utilization rule was written to prevent, and that strategy has now inverted.
If you are in any of these situations, the questions to answer this month are: who was the importer of record on that equipment, when did it enter, and what is the realistic installation date. If the answer to the last one is after early December, the conversation to have with your EPC and counsel is happening now, not in November.
Separately, a new trade case is underway, and it is worth keeping distinct from the one just discussed.
In April, the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing Trade Committee, a group of domestic manufacturers, filed new antidumping and countervailing duty petitions against the same four countries. These are not a circumvention inquiry and not an extension of the China orders. They are new cases, on their own merits, seeking new duties.
The distinction matters because the two proceedings have separate timelines, separate legal standards, and separate outcomes. Preliminary determinations in the new case are expected later this year, and preliminary determinations in these proceedings can trigger provisional duties and retroactive liability on their own schedule.
For procurement purposes the practical implication is that the four countries that supplied most US modules through 2023 remain under active trade scrutiny from two directions at once. Sourcing decisions made on the assumption that the expiration of the moratorium was the last shoe to drop are premature.
Inventory your inventory. Identify every module on hand that entered under the moratorium, with entry dates and importer of record. This is a document request to your EPC or distributor, and some of them will not have it readily available, which is itself informative.
Prioritize installation of moratorium-vintage equipment. If you have a portfolio with several projects in flight, the sequencing question is no longer purely about interconnection or cash flow. Equipment with a December utilization deadline should go in first.
Do not resell surplus modules from moratorium stock. Resale to another party specifically defeats the utilization test. If you are long on equipment, that is a problem to solve with counsel, not on the secondary market.
Re-price forward procurement from certified suppliers only. For anything being ordered now, the supplier certification position is the first question, not the last. A quote from an uncertified supplier in a covered country is not a real quote.
Watch the new case, not just the old one. Ask your supplier what its exposure is under the April petitions, not only under the circumvention determination.
We wrote in 2022 that trade policy had become a live budget variable on multi-year capital projects. Two years on, that has been confirmed more thoroughly than we would have liked.
A district or commercial owner running a three-year development cycle has now seen the governing regime change three times: initiation of a circumvention inquiry, a two-year emergency suspension, and now expiration into a new petition. None of those changes were predictable from inside the project.
The lesson is not that solar procurement is unmanageable. It is that duty risk belongs in the project budget as a named line with an owner, and in the contract as an allocated risk, rather than being handled as an assumption that conditions will hold. Projects that did that in 2022 are having easier conversations this month than projects that did not.
