U.S. solar industry is doing just fine — for now

Coming off a record year for U.S. solar installations in 2016, the first quarter of 2017 wasn't so bad, either, according to data released by the Solar Energy Industries Association, the industry's lead trade group.

The nation saw the installation of more than 2 gigawatts, or billion watts, of new solar capacity, a quarter of it on individual rooftops, according to a Thursday report by the association and GTM Research.

That ranks solar second to natural gas overall for new U.S. electricity installations in the quarter, and was only a slight - 2 percent - year-on-year decline.

And yes, it's all happening under President Donald Trump, who has proposed to slash solar energy research funding, rescind the Clean Power Plan and withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement - and whose Energy Department is undertaking a study of the nation's electric grid that critics have charged is aimed at undermining intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar.

There are several reasons, explained Abigail Ross Hopper, the president and CEO of the solar association.

There still are state level incentives to add renewables to the grid, Hopper noted. Solar power itself keeps getting cheaper. And most of all, there's the 30 percent solar investment tax credit, which has been a huge boon to the industry and has been extended through 2021.

'The majority of projects are economic - and not policy - driven at this point, so as the prices have gone down, installations have gone up,” said Hopper.

Many of the quarter's solar installations - ranging from large scale utility installations to individualized rooftop arrays - were set in motion before Trump's election.

'The majority of the projects that came online in 2017 were already procured under the Obama administration in 2016,” she said. 'I think that has more to do with tax policy than who was in the White House. There was an extension of the investment tax credit at the end of 2015 ...

so then, as folks knew they had a little bit more time, there were a fair number of projects that spilled over.”

But installations aren't expected to slow down much, either. The industry projects there will be a total of 12.6 gigawatts of solar installed in 2017, which would fall short of 2016's record but still be a very impressive number.

Solar now provides about 1.6 percent of U.S. electricity, according to the association - reflecting 44.7 total installed gigawatts in the country - and should reach 2 percent by the end of this year. Wind supplies about 6 percent - but solar has had very rapid growth lately.