Tariffs, rampant industry hurdles force American solar manufacturer out of business

The solar shingle game in the United States has always been an uphill battle — even “front-runners” CertainTeed, GAF Energy and Tesla would likely agree. But New York-based SunTegra carved a place for itself in the high-end residential market and managed to run a successful business over the last decade navigating Chinese tariffs, a pandemic and scaling domestic manufacturing of a nontraditional solar product.

Now SunTegra CEO Oliver Koehler is pulling the plug on his passion project, citing the events of the last year as the final straw.

“If you don’t have access to capital to keep the ship going, you’re dead in the water. Unfortunately, the irony is that the Chinese companies do have access capital,” he said. “It’s really sad. I just wanted to make a better-looking solar panel.”

SunTegra started making silicon solar shingles and tiles in 2014. The products attached to the roof deck in an overlapping pattern with a patented ventilation design to reduce heat and increase energy production. The SunTegra Shingle was a 2-by-4-ft PV panel in an injection-molded frame that peaked at 114 W. The solar shingles were ideally installed on new-construction homes or during reroofing, so SunTegra found a niche with customers looking for premium aesthetic solar.

Koehler, already considered an industry veteran after stints at BP Solar and SunPower, had the experience to succeed, but the challenges started immediately.

“We’ve been impacted by tariffs from the first containers we had on the water, literally going back to 2014,” he said. “We initially had a supplier in China, like everyone else in those days. Then we switched to [American] Suniva solar cells, because there were some brewing tariffs targeting solar products made in China under Obama, and that was supposed to enable us to get around  these tariffs. Then there were last-minute changes by the Dept. of Commerce that any panel coming out of China is going to get tariffed regardless if they had US solar cells in them. Suddenly, we found out about this change and we had containers on the water already.”

Using U.S. silicon cells in China-assembled solar shingles quickly proved impractical. SunTegra then tried assembling in Indonesia, but the logistics there were difficult too. So Koehler turned to Mexicali, Mexico, for SunTegra’s custom solar panel production.

“We bought some [solar shingle] equipment from Dow Solar, which was closing down, and moved it to Mexico,” he said. “I signed a lease one week before Trump started attacking NAFTA, and then a year later new solar tariffs came into effect that also targeted Mexico and Canada.”

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created a free trade zone that eliminated tariffs among Canada, Mexico and the United States. Immediately upon taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump began negotiations to replace the agreement. The ensuing deliberations influenced the solar tariff investigations to also include Mexico and Canada, which up to that point had seemed like safe places to establish manufacturing.

SunTegra eventually linked with Prism Solar, a small bifacial panel manufacturer in New York. Together they cobbled together a small cell-to-module manufacturing line in Prism Solar’s facility with an annual capacity of 5 MW. But then COVID came and Prism’s parent company wanted out of manufacturing. The building was sold to an internet retailer.

“We tried to buy the equipment from Prism, but the new building owners did not want the manufacturing there. Finding a new space was too expensive, and the Prism laminator was also very expensive to move. We had to go back to Plan B, which was source a laminate from Asia and do the final assembly of the product in upstate New York near Binghamton,” Koehler said. “We found a supplier in Vietnam, and they did a good job. We were hoping to raise money and try to bring manufacturing back here to New York, but raising money for domestic solar manufacturing was difficult and slow. Then tariffs on Southeast Asia, which has been delayed for two years due to a Biden directive, started to brew. The preliminary tariffs looked not like the end of the world, and then they were the end of the world. They went from about 60% in December of 2024 to just over 200% in April of 2025. This stranded a container in Vietnam and cut off our revenue. Then the retroactive nature just killed us.”

The problem for SunTegra wasn’t lack of demand — it’s everything else. The SunTegra Shingle only consists of 24 cells, but manufacturing a small panel still requires the same equipment as a traditional, full-sized panel. Big panel factories don’t want to set aside space for boutique products, and there are no custom solar manufacturers in the United States.

“You need a certain critical mass of scale to bring the cost down. Asia was a great place for that,” Koehler said. “You find a small contract manufacturer that makes off-grid panels or garden lights. They have a laminator and skilled staff, and you can get these panels at a reasonable cost without having to spend a lot of capital on equipment and facilities. If that’s not a possibility, it’s hard. A lot bigger investment is needed to jumpstart that if you want to do it in the U.S., and that makes it even harder to raise capital.”

Without a cost-effective way to make the solar shingles and the uncertainty caused by Trump’s volatile tariff policy, Koehler was already nervous about SunTegra’s future. The expiration of the residential investment tax credit at the end of this year put the nail in the coffin.

“With the tax credit going away, it pushes solar shingles into more of an unrealistic payback,” Koehler said. “There’s definitely a place in the market [for solar shingles], but someone else will have to conquer it.”

SunTegra is in the process of notifying installation contractors and existing customers about the closing of its operations. Koehler said a service capability will remain to ensure questions about SunTegra installations and products are answered. The company will eventually consider selling its intellectual property, because Koehler still stands by SunTegra’s design and production value. It was just too difficult to make the solar shingle business work in the United States in the current environment.

“I still think there’s tons of promise [with solar shingles], but you worry that without a level playing field so people can innovate and do new things, you’re not going to lower costs and build a more creative grid. It’s going to be done in other countries,” he said. “What I did here is not a groundbreaking bit of innovation. It’s a product extension, or something like that. But even that proved way too hard to do, not because the customers don’t want it, but because there’s just way too much government involvement in the industry. And not just the U.S. government. Chinese dumping is real and that is a real problem that no U.S. administration has properly been able to address. But being in the crossfire is even worse.

“Part of me is like, I need to do something completely different for a while,” Koehler continued. “But I still love solar.”