Jeremy is right - when installing from a USB drive, boot the the usb, launch terminal, and run “ntpdate -u time.apple.com”. You should be able to install macOS at this point.

One problem I ran into - I could not install macOS from a Bootable USB. It indicated the installer was damaged. After re-creating the boot disk several time, re-downloading High Sierra, and confirming it works on other Macs, I found an apple discussion that suggested setting the time via terminal command before installing Mac OS from USB. The terminal command: ntpdate -u time.apple.com

This likely stems from unplugging the battery and the internal clock being reset.

After doing this, I was able to install macOS on the new SSD - hope it helps!