Note that this 13% rise (1Q 2018 over 1Q 2017) is way below the 2010–2015 trend, even discounting 2016; the article shows US photovoltaic installations growing during that time by 55% per year. Trump is clearly having a huge negative impact. For better or worse, other parts of the world are not Trump-restricted, so PV is continuing its exponential trend there.

Paidleaf raises the reasonable question in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17292776 as to why it matters when PV is only about 2% of US electric production (and thus about 0.6% of the total US energy maket). (The 1.3% number paidleaf gives is wrong; see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20... for more details, for example.) The reason is that exponential-growth phenomena, like the adoption of any new technology, are tiny for a long time until suddenly they aren't. If we suppose a 30% annual growth rate and an asymptote somewhere well above current world marketed energy consumption, then three years before PV is the majority of world marketed energy consumption, it will be only 32%; three years before that, only 17%; three years before that, only 8%; three years before that, only 4%; three years before that, only 2%, like the US's current electricity market.

Of course, you could reasonably argue that an immense drop in PV's annual growth rate from 55% to 13%, or even the SEIA's projected 0% for all of 2018, indicates that we're already approaching the asymptote! And, if that's true, of course it's relatively inconsequential what happens with PV — it might eventually grow from 2% to 4% or 6% or something, but it'll never be a viable alternative to coal, and at worst it's a dangerous distraction from the necessary switchover to nuclear power.

But every indication on the fundamentals is that this isn't the case. We aren't running into limits on energy demand, on raw-materials availability, or on solar-resource availability. Photovoltaic energy remains cheaper than other sources, even in the US — that's why it's the majority of new generating capacity — and panels continue to drop in price, indicating ample raw materials and a smoothly running supply chain. The majority of even high-solar-resource land is still not shaded by solar panels.

(I'm not saying that shading the majority of high-solar-resource land with solar panels is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm saying that a scarcity of high-solar-resource land is not currently a factor that could cause solar adoption to level off.)

bcatanzaro comments that the capacity factor for the solar panels on his house is about 12% https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17293375 and so 55% of new installed capacity is actually much less when it comes to actual generation. But utility-scale solar's capacity factor is typically closer to 25% (I guess bcatanzaro didn't choose his house's siting and roof angle optimally for solar power generation, but utilities can; or maybe he just isn't dusting them) and the other new generation is almost entirely natural gas and wind, which generally also have very low capacity factors.

Every indication is that economic development is still solar, and economic development is still happening, despite the gradual growth of what appears to be WWIII. It's just that the US is missing out.