The solar shingle game in the United States has always been an uphill battle – even “frontrunners” CertainTeed, GAF Energy and Tesla would probably agree. But New York-based SunTegra has carved out a niche for itself in the luxury residential market and has managed to run a successful business over the past decade, navigating Chinese tariffs, a pandemic and scaling up domestic production of a non-traditional solar product.
Now SunTegra CEO Oliver Koehler is pulling the plug on his passion project, calling the events of the past year the final straw.
Suntegra solar tiles
“If you don’t have access to capital to keep the ship running, you’re dead in the water. Unfortunately, the irony is that the Chinese companies do have access to capital,” he said. “It’s really sad. I just wanted to make a nicer solar panel.”
SunTegra started making silicon solar shingles and shingles in 2014. The products are 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 6.5 by 1.2 meter PV panel in an injection molded frame with a peak power of 114 W. The solar shingles were ideally suited to be installed on new construction homes or during roof renovations, so SunTegra found a niche among customers looking for high-quality aesthetic solar energy.
Koehler, already considered an industry veteran after his stints at BP Solar and SunPower, had the experience to succeed, but the challenges began immediately.
“We’ve been hit with tariffs from the first containers we had on the water, literally going back to 2014,” he said. “Initially we had a supplier in China, just like everyone else at the time, but then we switched [American] Suniva solar cells, because there were some brewing tariffs targeting solar products made in China under Obama, and that should allow us to avoid those tariffs. Then there were last minute changes by the Department of Commerce that any panel coming from China would be subject to a tariff, regardless of whether it had American solar cells in it. Suddenly we heard about this change and we already had containers on the water.”
Using American silicon cells in Chinese-assembled solar shingles quickly proved impractical. SunTegra then tried to assemble in Indonesia, but the logistics were also difficult there. That’s why Koehler turned to Mexicali, Mexico, for SunTegra’s custom solar panel production.
“We bought a few [solar shingle] equipment from Dow Solar, which was closing, and moved it to Mexico. A week before Trump started attacking NAFTA, I signed a lease, and a year later new solar tariffs went into effect that also targeted Mexico and Canada.”
A SunTegra installation
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) created a free trade area that eliminated tariffs between Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Immediately after taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump began negotiations to replace the agreement. The subsequent deliberations influenced the solar tariff investigations, which also included Mexico and Canada, which until then seemed safe places to locate manufacturing.
SunTegra eventually came into contact with Prism Solar, a small bifacial panel manufacturer in New York. Together they built a small cell-to-module production line at Prism Solar’s factory with an annual capacity of 5 MW. But then COVID happened and Prism’s parent company wanted to stop production. The building was sold to an internet store.
“We tried to buy the equipment from Prism, but the owners of the new building didn’t want production 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 bought a laminate from Asia and did 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 production back to New York, but raising money for domestic solar production has been difficult and slow. Then the Southeast Asia tariffs, which had been delayed for two years due to a Biden directive, started to pick up. The preliminary tariffs did not appear to be on the end of the world, but then they were the end of the world. They went from about 60% in December. from 2024 to just over 200% in April 2025. This left a container stranded in Vietnam and cut off our income. Then retroactivity just killed us.”
The problem for SunTegra wasn’t lack of demand; it’s everything else. The SunTegra Shingle consists of only 24 cells, but producing a small panel still requires the same equipment as a traditional full-size panel. Large panel factories don’t want to reserve space for boutique products, and there are no custom solar manufacturers in the United States.
“You need a certain critical scale to drive costs 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 a skilled workforce, and you can get these panels at a reasonable price without having to spend a lot of capital on equipment and facilities. If that’s not possible, it’s difficult. It takes much larger investments to make that happen 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 produce solar energy and the uncertainty caused by Trump’s volatile tariff policies, Koehler was already nervous about SunTegra’s future. The expiration of the housing investment discount at the end of this year was the final nail in the coffin.
Oliver Koehler, CEO and founder of SunTegra
“Now that the tax credit is disappearing, the payback period for solar shingles becomes even more unrealistic,” Koehler said. “There is certainly a place in the market [for solar shingles]but someone else will have to overcome it.”
SunTegra is informing installation companies and existing customers about the closure of its activities. Koehler said a service option will continue to exist to ensure questions about SunTegra installations and products are answered. The company will eventually consider selling its intellectual property, as Koehler still stands behind SunTegra’s design and manufacturing value. It was simply too difficult to make the solar industry in the United States function in the current environment.
“I still think there is a lot 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 reduce costs and build a more creative network. It’s going to happen in other countries,” he said. “What I did here is not a groundbreaking piece of innovation. It’s a product extension or something like that. But even that turned out to be far too difficult to do, not because customers don’t want it, but because there is simply far too much government interference in the sector. And not just the US government. Chinese dumping is real and that is a real problem that no US government has been able to properly address. But being caught in the crossfire is even worse.
“Part of me says, I need to do something completely different for a while,” Koehler continued. “But I still love solar energy.”
