John thanks for your input, its a appreciated.

We agree the long term effect will be choking of energy flow, but to me this will take some time, meantime the government will be expecting to see a sudden jump in government income, just because the system will still have momentum, whether the additional energy comes from internal or external parties - I guess initially it might be from importers like you say, but in time, they would have to try to compensate by putting prices up to their external importing clients, because of course they can't take the hit to profit for long. Might see a spate of importers going bankrupt, and that would stop the energy flow completely.

Another thing that comes to mind, is that its possible that China for example, might be able to sustain considerable increase of prices, because internally, China might be monetising solar (They have massive government owned solar), and be pouring this into manufacturing business, subsidising business with it, in which case the US exporting businesses in China just request more government money, and the government will provide it. Maybe Trump knows this and is counting on it, who really knows - time will tell.

I agree its unlikely companies will appear in the US to replace what will be lost by loss of imports. But there is a possibility that the public, equipped with solar indexed stimulus, would rescue the economy, the US just becomes an exporter of energy in the form of hydrogen, created by the public, from solar.

That would be cool, surely, very cool, literally :)