The leadership of the solar industry let out a collective gasp of relief Tuesday. While it seems that tariffs will be imposed on China’s exports of photovoltaic cells, at least for now they are relatively minimal. Yet it’s still a fragile time for the industry and anything that raises cost within the supply chain or to the end customer needs to be viewed as a potential threat to continued market expansion.

The Department of Commerce announced its formal determination that China has in fact unfairly subsidized its solar industry and imposed tariffs ranging from 2.9 percent to 4.73 percent on three major Chinese exporters of solar PV modules. These “countervailing duties” are significantly lower than those anticipated by pundits on both