The green energy industry has been through this before, with tariffs by Trump in his first administration, as well as by Presidents Obama and Biden, on solar panels from China. If the goal of tariffs is to boost domestic production and punish exporting nations, those earlier levies failed, as Chinese companies simply shifted production to non-tariff countries in Southeast Asia. Now the United States imports its solar panels mainly from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

A study by Cornell, Yale, NYU, and Duke economists found the tariffs did not end up increasing manufacturing in the United States much, but they did have a significant — and negative — effect on the installation sector, which accounts for nearly 30 percent of Massachusetts’ clean energy jobs.

Tariffs on solar panels under Biden led to “a small increase in labor in manufacturing, but you had a huge decrease in labor in installation,” saidRobert Stavins, a energy and economic development professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Trump has threatened to pull the plug on offshore wind and directly restrict support for renewable energy production.Last month, he also pledged to slap a 25 percent tariff on Mexican and Canadian imports and an additional 10 percent import tax on Chinese goods. If implemented, imported goods in every sector could go up, including the equipment that powers the state’s transition off fossil fuels, from solar panels to batteries to transmission cables.

“For Massachusetts, it’s going to be unambiguously bad,” Stavins said.

And here’s the kicker: Experts agree that slowing the expansion of renewable energy will also likely drive up electricity rates across the board in Massachusetts, which already has among the highest such costs in the nation.

In 2022, Biden visited the abandoned plant in Brayton Point, promising “to build a different future, one with clean energy, good-paying jobs” for New England residents.

But under Trump, the costs of imported equipment could spike, dealing a “fairly significant hit” to the clean energy industry, said Kyle Murray, director of state program implementation at the climate nonprofit Acadia Center — and to the state’s goal of adding 34,000 clean energy jobs to the workforce by 2030.

“If you’re driving up prices … energy would not be spared,” Murray said. “There’s a lot of things the state can do regarding incentives and tax breaks, but we’re gonna have to think creatively and work quickly to try and mitigate any potential harms.”

As of 2022, nearly 44,000 people were employed in clean energy construction, installation, and maintenance across the state, including more than 12,000 in renewable energy. Those jobs range from solar panel installers, who number more than 1,800, to the nearly 3,500 electricians whose work is focused on renewable energy projects like setting up the on-land transmission lines for offshore wind.

“If Trump does what he said he was going to do … it’s going to hurt. It’s going to crush hundreds, if not thousands, of jobs for the foreseeable future,” said Jeff Plaisted, electrician and business agent for IBEW Local Union 223 who worked on the onshore component of Vineyard Wind 1.

Plaisted said the next project slated for the union’s members is SouthCoast Wind at Brayton Point — if the final federal permits are approved.

“We’re counting on that work,” he said. “In six to eight months, we could have absolutely full employment with 100 percent of our membership working … or not. That’s basically where we’re at.”

Prysmian, the cable manufacturer, declined to comment on the economic impact of promised Trump tariffs.

Still, some renewable energy advocates and industry professionals are optimistic the impactson local jobswill be minimal.

Tariffsare“a devil we know,” said Daniel Shugar, founder of solar tech companyNextracker. Shugar said the country’s existing inventory of panels, both those made in the United States and imported from countries such as India, should provide some “buffer” against rising prices for prospective customers.

Patrick Crowley, head of the Rhode Island Climate Jobs Coalition and Rhode Island’s AFL-CIO president, noted the industry has already weathered high tariffs on Chinese solar panels under the Biden administration.

“Despite that, the last couple of years have seen tremendous increases in the deployment of solar panels at both the industrial and the residential level,” he said, pointing to the 32 gigawatts of industrial-scale solar built in the United States in 2023, more than double the previous year. “It might be a lot more difficult over the next couple of years than it has been … but we’re well positioned” to keep the momentum with jobs and installations going, he said.

As for wind energy, Harvard government professor Stephen Ansolabehere, who researches the clean energy transition, said that while Massachusetts’ ability to scale up offshore wind will likely be slowed in the coming decade, he expects projects such as SouthCoast Wind — which are close to being finalized or already permitted — will be allowed to continue. Those jobs are crucial toreplacing work in the fossil fuel industry as the state tries to meet its climate goals.

“We are in an area of New England that isn’t building new power plants — we’re shutting them down,” Plaisted said. “Offshore wind, solar, battery storage, these are all local jobs that are going to keep our local economy going.”

In the geothermal heating and cooling industry, meanwhile, industry professionals see themselves as fairly insulated from tariffs.

“The heart of geothermal is in Oklahoma, the major factories that produce the geothermal heat pumps are in” Indiana, Florida, and South Dakota, said Zeyneb Magavi, chief executive of HEET, a Massachusetts clean energy nonprofit that focuses on geothermal. “At the moment, I have not found something that gets in the way of geothermal being unusually resilient to a political environment.”

A Department of Public Utilities analysis from 2022 projects that about one-quarter of the state’s building sector will use geothermal networks for heating and cooling by 2050.

Yet, even with manufacturing hubs in red states,US factories continue to rely on imports of raw materials, which could rise in cost with across-the-board tariffs.

The geothermal industry does, however, have an ace up its sleeve to play with the Trump administration: In Massachusetts, the nascent industry is working with natural gas companies — which Trump has vowed to protect — to build the underground infrastructure that powers geothermal heat pumps.

Geothermal heating and cooling could even be a potential local job booster for manufacturing, Magavi noted, since “we do make our own drills and we do make our own geothermal heat pumps, and it is an industry that is small enough and needs to grow [enough] that building more local manufacturing would be great.”

Many who work in clean energy share a cautious sense of optimism.

Because the clean energy transition is well underway, no executive order will be able to stop the free market in its tracks, said Harry Godfrey, a managing director at the clean energy trade association Advanced Energy United.

“But none of these technologies, none of these industries, are Trump-proof,” he added. “Let’s be clear about that.”

Ivy Scott can be reached at ivy.scott@globe.com. Follow her @itsivyscott.