On June 30, 2026, Reuters reported, citing five people familiar with the matter, that the Trump administration is drafting a ban on imports of foreign-made inverters — the critical equipment that connects solar projects and energy-storage systems to the power grid. A report from the US Department of Energy back in February this year had already acknowledged that there is no evidence whatsoever that Chinese-made inverters have malicious communication devices embedded in them — but that has not stopped the ban from moving forward.
In an interview with Russia's Sputnik news agency, Liu Ying, a research fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China, offered a clearly structured analytical framework. Set this ban alongside the European Union's parallel financing ban on Chinese inverters, and a clear thread emerges: the "securitization" of clean-energy supply chains is spreading from chips and telecom equipment to critical components of the green transition such as solar PV and energy storage, and the configuration of the contest among China, the United States, and Europe in the new-energy field is being redefined.
The Ban's Two Drivers: Over-Securitization and Allied Coordination
Liu Ying traces the momentum behind the ban to two intertwined threads.
The first thread is the inertial spread of over-securitization. The inverter's original role is as critical equipment for the green transition — converting the direct current produced by solar panels into alternating current that can be fed into the grid. But in the American discourse system, any device with communication capability gets folded into the framework of "remote-access risk." This is not just an inverter problem — the EU has already barred financing for Chinese inverters under the banner of "data security," and the United States is now replicating that narrative template and escalating it into a direct import ban.
The US Department of Energy's official report of February 2026 stated explicitly that even if a single inverter were "compromised," it would be unlikely to affect the power grid as a whole. The report recommended that component buyers familiarize themselves with the full functionality of the products they procure — a standard technical-safety recommendation, not grounds for an emergency ban.
The second thread is allied coordination. Reporting noted explicitly that "part of the reason" the Trump administration revived this ban was the European Commission's earlier decision to prohibit the use of Chinese-made inverters in publicly funded energy projects. This pattern — "the EU provides the policy reference and precedent, the US follows and amplifies" — means that US–European policy coordination toward China in critical supply-chain domains is spreading from chips and AI into the broader clean-energy field.
Triple Impact: Supply Chains, Trade, and Industrial Competition
Liu Ying distills the ban's potential impact into three levels, each pointing at a different pressure point.
At the supply-chain level, the core paradox of the ban lies in America's heavy dependence on Chinese inverters — more than ninety percent of inverter demand is met by imports, and China is precisely the world's largest inverter producer, led by Sungrow. Finding alternative supply in the short term is virtually impossible, which means the ban would directly raise costs for US domestic clean-energy projects and slow overall deployment. The data has already flashed a warning signal: rattled by news of the ban, A-share solar and storage stocks opened sharply lower on July 1, and Sungrow plunged nearly twenty percent intraday before closing down 13.9 percent.
At the trade-relations level, the ban would land in a delicate period. After Trump's visit to China, China–US relations have broadly shown signs of warming, but the signal of this ban implies that the tit-for-tat in the economic and trade domain has not stopped along with the political thaw. Liu Ying's judgment: the overall easing of bilateral relations remains the dominant trend, and whether the inverter ban "ultimately lands is also an unknown" — but even remaining at the "proposed" stage, it is already a clear barometer of policy direction.
The United States has enormous demand for Chinese products in AI data centers, integrated solar-plus-storage systems, and power-plant retrofits. Under the same administration's policy framework, "dependence" and "restriction" coexist and serve different political audiences — a structural contradiction that cannot be reconciled in the short term.
At the industrial-competition level, Liu Ying's analysis touches on a deeper shift: the essence of the inverter ban is "industrial protection policy," not a genuine national-security measure. Under the banner of over-securitization, the United States is nurturing its own still-weak clean-energy manufacturing base. But once set in motion, this policy could lead more countries to adopt similar instruments — subsidies, procurement restrictions — pushing the global clean-energy market toward fragmentation. The EU's ban has already provided a cautionary precedent: by Reuters' estimates, the EU ban will affect at least fourteen gigawatts of new solar installation capacity, more than twenty percent of the EU's annual additions.
A Crossroads for Firms: Sungrow's Complex Relationship with the US Market
Sungrow occupies a delicate position in this contest. It is both an important player in the US markets for energy-storage inverters and large-scale solar inverters, and a flagship enterprise of the Chinese PV supply chain "going global." The US market belongs to Sungrow's high-margin core business segment, and the ban would strike directly at its profit structure.
But Liu Ying's analysis offers a longer-term perspective: losing access to the US market could prompt Chinese inverter firms to accelerate their push into Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and other regional markets, while also pushing firms to intensify technological innovation. In other words, the ban may accelerate Chinese companies' "de-Americanization" — not a voluntary exit, but a forced completion of a regional rebalancing of global markets.
Comparison with the EU Ban: From Financing Restrictions to Import Bans
Set the draft US inverter ban alongside the ban the EU has already enacted, and the differences are worth noting:
- The EU ban operates on the "financing end" — barring banks from financing renewable-energy projects that use Chinese inverters, a form of indirect market exclusion
- The US ban operates on the "import end" — directly prohibiting imports of foreign inverters, a form of direct trade barrier
Together they form a two-layer blockade of "financing regime plus import controls." For Chinese firms, this means the same product must contend with market-access restrictions on two different levels at once — in Europe the problem is not that they "cannot sell," but that "even if buyers buy, they cannot obtain financing"; in America they simply "cannot sell" outright. The two restrictions differ in nature, but their combined effect is this: the markets of the world's two largest developed economies are simultaneously closing their doors to Chinese inverters.