When President Trump announced a 30-percent tariff on Chinese solar panels, the U.S. solar industry responded with an unsurprising outcry against the protectionist measure that aimed to make locally produced panels more competitive but, the industry said, would ultimately hurt a growing industry by raising its costs considerably. Indeed, costs went up, with a recent report from Energy Sage calculating that the cost of a residential solar installation is 5.6 percent higher than it would have been without the tariffs. This amounts to US$960 per household or US$236.5 million in total for the period between September 2017 and September 2018. In addition to the higher installation costs resulting from higher panel prices, the tariffs also led to the shelving of a number of expansion projects worth US$2.5 billion as of June, Reuters reported at the time. The figure compared with US$1 billion announced in local panel manufacturing capacity expansion, […]