Solar strategist helps solar make sense of its policy ‘mess’

These days, Brian Lynch, strategy and policy director for REC Americas, a solar module manufacturer, keeps up a brisk pace in his growing role as an authoritative tour guide surveying the industry’s hot mess of issues.

Demand for Lynch is running so hot that a colleague quipped it was second in popularity only to fan fever over pop megastar Taylor Swift’s $2-billion-gross The Eras Tour.

For Lynch and his colleague, the comparison is an absurd conceit. Yet, over the past month, Lynch has shared his broad store of solar knowledge at the rate of two industry talks a week.

Lynch recently spoke at industry gatherings in Connecticut, Florida and Louisiana. Next up: REC Solar’s “Making Sense of the Mess” webinar and events in Chicago and Miami.

Back in his home office in Rochester, N.Y., Lynch fields media interviews, posts insights and provides consultations.

“I’ve become very popular over the past weeks,” says Lynch during a recent interview with pv magazine USA.

“We’re at a very important inflection point,” Lynch says. “The regulatory and trade issues that exist in 2025 are more impactful and complex than in the 20 years I’ve been in this industry.”

It’s easy to make his case: The Trump administration is overhauling U.S. trade ties with the world. Litigation against Chinese imports is re-contouring the global solar business. Republican lawmakers are slashing incentives that have driven industry growth for 20 years. And, they’re advancing rules to bar companies backed by adversary countries, mainly China, from tapping the incentives.

By forcing the industry to hold its breath, volatile uncertainties are stifling investment and therefore growth, Lynch says. Once resolved, the lull could take years to lift.

“What will be the rules in three months? This is the challenge,” he says. “When you keep changing the rules of the game unpredictably, you don’t have confidence and certainty.”

Lynch aims to help everyone with a stake in solar to clear the confusion, even if, by his insistence, he’s no technocratic expert.

For the rest of 2025, Lynch is most closely watching:

The residential clean energy credit (25D). The credit has long fueled residential demand and thousands of installers. Originally to end in 2032, the 30% tax credit would terminate at year’s end under a House bill passed this week. “This is an existential threat to small businesses across the country,” Lynch says.
Foreign entity of concern (FEOC) rules. The House budget bill proposes rules to halt companies backed or influenced by adversary nations from accessing U.S. tax incentives. Though the devil lurks in the details, Lynch says, “The goal is to minimize taxpayer assistance to Chinese companies.”
Solar trade disputes with China. This week, stiff tariffs on Chinese imports from factories in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam were approved to begin in June. Cases against imports from other countries could emerge, depending on where Chinese companies move factories next.
The so-called inventory overhang. A court battle over a former, two-year, Biden-era moratorium on duties against Chinese companies’ exports from Southeast Asia could affect huge inventories if their utilization timing is deemed not to have been protected. “Tens of gigawatts may hang in the balance,” Lynch says.

Most key U.S. policy issues link to China’s strategic industry policy, he says.

“We have to acknowledge that China plays with a separate playbook and set of rules,” Lynch says. Though low-priced American solar imports from Chinese companies undoubtedly beefed up the U.S. industry, he says, the companies have no strategic reason to hold down prices forever. The world industry will reach maturity, he says, only after it begins operating based on “mutually normalized financial factors.”

Though domestic module output is nearing close to satisfying domestic demand, Lynch says much work remains to reclaim other supply segments. “We need a supply chain that exists outside of China in the strategic industries,” he says.

Fortunately, he says, both the political right and left appear motivated to address tumult from Chinese trade. Chinese companies have shifted factories from one country in to another in attempts to evade U.S. tariffs.

“The FEOC rules may be the way to end the cat-and-mouse game,” Lynch says.

Just as take-no-prisoner upheavals have plagued the American solar industry at intervals, so, too, have they bedeviled Lynch’s career. He has suffered repeated dislocations as his employers have struggled under the industry’s dire straits.

After 8½ years with Schott Solar – as PR manager, then sales director – parent company Schott AG withdrew from solar in mid-2012 over “drastic” market “deterioration.”

Yet, within a month, Lynch was leading projects for SolarWorld Americas Inc., tapping the German company’s fully vertically integrated factory in Oregon. In so doing, he held a front-row seat to watch SolarWorld’s trade-case fight for its life against Chinese imports. (For five years, he worked alongside this story’s contributing editor.)

Noting the hallmarks of corporate doom, Lynch resigned from SolarWorld Americas the day that parent Solarworld AG declared insolvency in 2017 in Europe, leaving its U.S. unit to solvently fend for itself until its own collapse 1½ years later.

Lynch would serve as director of solar and storage for South Korean conglomerate LG. But after three years, LG beset him with feelings of déjà vu when it pulled out of solar over “uncertainties in the global solar panel business.”

After several years of industry consulting and project development as founder of Brighton Renewables, Lynch assumed his REC role 2½ years ago.

Lynch is philosophical, buoyant even, about his employers’ seismic seizures. He has grown used to feeling he’s careening through his career in a bumper car. “I’m a little numb to solar,” he says.

“I can’t leave it,” Lynch says. “I’m hooked.”

Lynch says he takes stock that solar enables him to help support his family knowing that he’s “doing something good.”

Long term, he grasps the necessity for solar to help meet ever-rising demand to power electric vehicles, home electrification and data centers.

On the road mainly in the eastern side of the U.S., Lynch also enjoys glimpses of his contributions to visible, tangible, mainstream solar installations.

“They’re shingles on a roof,” Lynch says. “They’re right there.”

Recently landing at the Tampa, Fla., airport, he peered down on a 2-megawatt array he had led a team in perching atop a parking garage pestered by high winds. “It was probably the most complicated project I’ve worked on,” Lynch says.

On LinkedIn, Lynch estimates he’s participated in “hundreds of megawatts of solar projects.”

Lynch’s solar pride helps drive the twitch-muscle speed of his mind, speech and work and horizon-wide industry fascinations, down to far-flung esoterica. He’s equally happy perusing data tracking spectral characteristics of light-induced degradation and imports flagged under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

Amid the policy fray, Lynch aims more to highlight key points for REC’s insiders, customers and even external audiences than to advise them how to think or act. Lynch says he holds to the adage that a rising tide lifts all boats.

With REC and solar alike, he contends, “The next chapter will be the most thrilling.”

(Also read the recent OpEd by Lynch: Deciphering solar supply chain challenges and where we go from here.)

This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.