The Biggest Clean Energy Impacts from Trump’s Tariffs

The Trump Administration’s wide-reaching tariffs, announced on April 2, introduced 10% tariffs on all imported goods and additional import taxes for many countries. 

The tariffs sent global markets plunging and is expected to have a drastic impact on U.S. consumers and industries. Despite President Donald Trump’s claim that tariffs will boost domestic production, experts say that when it comes to clean energy, the tariffs stand to drive up costs for U.S. companies that receive supplies from abroad—and throw the global supply chain into disarray. 

“For just the batteries and the solar panels and the wind turbines that we want to build in the United States, we’re going to need international parts and components and materials for those,” says Bentley Allan, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab. “These are not materials or components that we can just start producing ourselves on the time scales that we need in order to achieve climate goals.”

Here are some of the biggest impacts the tariffs stand to have on clean energy industries. 

Batteries

Grid batteries are facing a roughly 65% tariff that could rise to more than 80% by next year—just as the U.S. was expected to see record expansion in adoption in battery storage. In February, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that 18.2 GW of utility-scale battery storage would be added to the United State’s energy grid in 2025. Most lithium-ion batteries required for this, however, are imported from China; Chinese lithium-ion battery exports to the U.S. reached an all-time high of $1.9 billion in December 2024. And while battery prices are shifting downwards worldwide due to an oversupply, tariffs are expected to increase the cost in the U.S.

Read more: Do Climate Goals Matter in a Bad Economy?

Electric Vehicle Manufacturing 

In recent years, many American car manufacturers have attempted to boost their electric vehicle production after the Biden Administration set a mandate that 50% of all new car sales should be electric by 2030, and many states set their own zero-emission mandates. Trump’s tariffs, on top of other anti-EV moves by the current administration, stand to slow down this progress.

The Trump Administration has kept a Biden-era policy that imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs—all but banning their sale in the U.S. as they grow in popularity abroad. 

Even if a car is American made, many of the parts needed are imported from abroad. “Even though we’re building our domestic manufacturing capacities as fast as we possibly can, we still are going to need to be importing, especially upstream materials,” says Allan. “Critical minerals, cathode, ingots and wafers, poly silicon, we’re going to need to import those supplies, and they all just got more expensive.”

Solar Power

The majority of the U.S.’s solar equipment is shipped from Southeast Asia, a region that has seen among the highest tariff rates imposed. Many U.S. developers have been stockpiling solar panels in anticipation of the tariffs, with Bloomberg reporting that the excess inventory might prevent the industry from feeling the full shock of the tariffs.

But still, experts warn that domestic supply might not be able to keep up with demand—especially given that the U.S. supply chain has not been built up to meet it. 

“Even if we wanted to build an all in United States battery or solar supply chain, it’s going to take us a long time to accumulate the expertise and the knowledge necessary in order to do that,” says Allan. “By basically creating a shock in the middle of that process, we’re slowing that process down and making it more difficult to complete.”

But just as the price of clean energy adoption might be on the rise, so too will the cost of fossil fuels, experts say. “To the extent that we have tariffs from countries from which we depend on for energy inputs, even if we shift towards fossil fuels, we’re still going to pay the price of the tariffs through those fossil fuels,” says Antonio Bento, professor of public policy and economics at University of Southern California. Michigan, Minnesota, and New York in particular rely on Canadian energy—now expected to see a price hike with a 10% tariff.