This Case Could Upend America’s $29 Billion Solar Industry

Ten years ago an engineering professor at Georgia Tech started a company outside Atlanta with the hope of manufacturing solar panels in America. And for a while it worked. The company, Suniva, grew into one of the largest panel makers in the U.S., with 350 employees. But it was always dwarfed by rivals in Asia, which have flooded the U.S. with cheap panels, driving prices down 60 percent over the past five years. By 2014, Suniva was outsourcing some of its assembly work to federal prisons to cut costs. In 2015 it sold a 64 percent stake in itself to a solar company in Hong Kong, Shunfeng International Clean Energy Ltd., for $57.8 million. The money was supposed to fund an aggressive expansion, but it didn’t last long. Last year, Suniva lost $29 million. On April 17 it declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Days later, Suniva invoked an obscure law to ­initiate a government trade investigation that has the power to upend the $29 billion U.S. solar industry. Unlike typical trade complaints, which often hinge on charges that companies or countries are violating specific trade rules, this particular law allows the president to unilaterally impose broad tariffs simply if surging imports are hurting U.S. manufacturers. The law has been around since 1974, but for years companies didn’t bother filing such cases, knowing the president would turn them down. The last ­successful case, involving steel imports, was in 2002. Now they have a sympathetic audience. “With Trump, there’s a good reason to think he’d consider it,” says Michael Moore, an economics professor at George Washington University who’s an expert in international trade policy. “If I was a Chinese company, I’d be thinking it was a credible threat.”