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Manufacturers and installers have different opinions on tariffs.
The American solar industry is in a tizzy over tariffs. On one side are the companies that develop, finance, and install solar systems. On the other, the American (or American-located) companies that manufacture them.
China’s solar panel industry has been a combination of boon and bugaboo for American renewable energy efforts for years. On the one hand, the solar development sector has benefitted from the cheap panels they have happily put up on roofs and in fields across the country, underpinning the massive growth of solar power in the past decade.
And then on the other there’s the still-nascent American solar manufacturing industry (and a South Korean company with a substantial facility in Georgia), which joined together to file petitions with the Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission Wednesday, beseeching them to investigate what it argues are violations of trade laws by Chinese-owned solar panel manufacturers in Southeast Asia.
The group claims that China’s 80% market share in solar products is a “near monopoly” underpinned by “unfair trade practices,” including subsidies and selling at below-cost. About two-thirds of installed solar panels come from overseas, the group claims, “with the majority arriving without safeguard measures or tariffs from China via Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand.” The Southeast Asian imports the petition targets are worth some $12 billion annually.
“America’s solar manufacturing industry is on the cusp of tremendous growth that will create jobs and change the trajectory of our clean energy transition for decades to come,” Tim Brightbill, a lawyer representing the group, said in a release. “However, this manufacturing renaissance is being threatened by China’s industrial policy, which has led to massive subsidization in China and Southeast Asia.”
The solar manufacturers’ petition comes as a two-year moratorium on tariffs against Chinese solar panels is due to expire next month. Solar developers had been lobbying the White House to boost other kinds of support for American solar manufacturing, hoping to head off any push for new tariffs, Bloomberg reported. But according to Reuters, the administration is inclined to take the protectionist side.
“Reducing reliance on Chinese clean energy imports, such as solar panels, is among the most bipartisan issues within clean energy,” Morningstar analyst Brett Castelli wrote in a note. For Republicans, China‘s solar dominance represents yet another strategic asset controlled by an adversary state. For Democrats, they are choking off a burgeoning American manufacturing sector.
And yet the question is not as simple as support U.S. solar or don’t. The likely “tightening of solar panel imports into the U.S. would benefit First Solar,” an American solar manufacturer that’s part of the petitioning group, Castelli wrote, “while being a net negative for the rest of our solar sector coverage.”
The Biden administration has long put itself squarely behind American solar. The Inflation Reduction Act’s advanced manufacturing production credit subsidizes domestic renewable energy manufacturing in the United States, while Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has criticized Chinese “overcapacity” in renewable energy technology. On the installer side, there are tax credits and subsidy programs to make solar more affordable to individuals.
While the solar manufacturers certainly are not unhappy with their tax credits, they see action on trade as an existential issue.
“Everyone knows these Chinese-headquartered companies in Southeast Asia are benefiting from subsidies and exporting below-cost solar into the U.S. market, harming American solar manufacturers and their workers,” Mike Carr, the executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition, said in a statement. “Conditions are untenable for American solar manufacturers.”
Other renewable energy trade groups — The American Council on Renewable Energy, the American Clean Power Association, and Advanced Energy United — call tariffs a threat to clean energy deployment. The manufacturers’ petition “creates market uncertainty in the U.S. solar industry and poses a potential threat to the build-out of a domestic solar supply chain,” the groups said in a statement, which also noting that they support a “strong domestic solar supply chain,” and specifically the tax credits that encourage onshore production of solar panels.
But while trade groups lament the stoking of trade war to anyone who will listen, companies — or at least one very big company — is telling its investors that things are going to be OK.
NextEra, one of the country’s largest renewable energy developers and operators, has been telling investors and analysts that the petitions and potential tariffs would not be a big deal.
“We expect that any trade actions that would occur this time around will be very manageable,” NextEra CEO John Ketchum said on the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday. The company didn’t expect any potential trade restriction “to result in delivery stoppages,” he added, and since NextEra orders panels well before actual construction on a project commences, that “gives us a lot of time and opportunity to be able to troubleshoot any issues should they arise,” Ketchum said.
Finally, even if there were new tariffs, the gap in cost between domestic and overseas panels – the exact thing that the solar manufacturers and the Biden administration lament — is so large that “there’s a lot of economic reasons for deliveries to continue to occur.” Even a 15% tariff on Chinese solar panels, Ketchum said, would be “quite manageable.”
While everyone says they want an American solar manufacturing industry to succeed, trade protection and tax credits can only go so far.
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Republicans are taking over some of the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth.
When Republicans flipped the Senate, they took the keys to three critical energy and climate-focused committees.
These are among the most powerful institutions for crafting climate policy on Earth. The Senate plays the role of gatekeeper for important legislation, as it requires a supermajority to overcome the filibuster. Hence, it’s both where many promising climate bills from the House go to die, as well as where key administrators such as the heads of the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency are vetted and confirmed.
We’ll have to wait a bit for the Senate’s new committee chairs to be officially confirmed. But Jeff Navin, co-founder at the climate change-focused government affairs firm Boundary Stone Partners, told me that since selections are usually based on seniority, in many cases it’s already clear which Republicans are poised to lead under Trump and which Democrats will assume second-in-command (known as the ranking member). Here’s what we know so far.
1. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
This committee has been famously led by Joe Manchin, the former Democrat, now Independent senator from West Virginia, who will retire at the end of this legislative session. Energy and Natural Resources has a history of bipartisan collaboration and was integral in developing many of the key provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act —- and could thus play a key role in dismantling them. Overall, the committee oversees the DOE, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, so it’s no small deal that its next chairman will likely be Mike Lee, the ultra-conservative Republican from Utah. That’s assuming that the committee's current ranking member, John Barrasso of Wyoming, wins his bid for Republican Senate whip, which seems very likely.
Lee opposes federal ownership of public lands, setting himself up to butt heads with Martin Heinrich, the Democrat from New Mexico and likely the committee’s next ranking member. Lee has also said that solving climate change is simply a matter of having more babies, as “problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they’re solved by more humans.” As Navin told me, “We've had this kind of safe space where so-called quiet climate policy could get done in the margins. And it’s not clear that that's going to continue to exist with the new leadership.”
2. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
This committee is currently chaired by Democrat Tom Carper of Delaware, who is retiring after this term. Poised to take over is the Republican’s current ranking member, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. She’s been a strong advocate for continued reliance on coal and natural gas power plants, while also carving out areas of bipartisan consensus on issues such as nuclear energy, carbon capture, and infrastructure projects during her tenure on the committee. The job of the Environment and Public Works committee is in the name: It oversees the EPA, writes key pieces of environmental legislation such as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and supervises public infrastructure projects such as highways, bridges, and dams.
Navin told me that many believe the new Democratic ranking member will be Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, although to do so, he would have to step down from his perch at the Senate Budget Committee, where he is currently chair. A tireless advocate of the climate cause, Whitehouse has worked on the Environment and Public Works committee for over 15 years, and lately seems to have had a relatively productive working relationship with Capito.
3. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development
This subcommittee falls under the broader Senate Appropriations Committee and is responsible for allocating funding for the DOE, various water development projects, and various other agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
California’s Dianne Feinstein used to chair this subcommittee until her death last year, when Democrat Patty Murray of Washington took over. Navin told me that the subcommittee’s next leader will depend on how the game of “musical chairs” in the larger Appropriations Committee shakes out. Depending on their subcommittee preferences, the chair could end up being John Kennedy of Louisiana, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, or Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. It’s likewise hard to say who the top Democrat will be.
Inside a wild race sparked by a solar farm in Knox County, Ohio.
The most important climate election you’ve never heard of? Your local county commissioner.
County commissioners are usually the most powerful governing individuals in a county government. As officials closer to community-level planning than, say a sitting senator, commissioners wind up on the frontlines of grassroots opposition to renewables. And increasingly, property owners that may be personally impacted by solar or wind farms in their backyards are gunning for county commissioner positions on explicitly anti-development platforms.
Take the case of newly-elected Ohio county commissioner – and Christian social media lifestyle influencer – Drenda Keesee.
In March, Keesee beat fellow Republican Thom Collier in a primary to become a GOP nominee for a commissioner seat in Knox County, Ohio. Knox, a ruby red area with very few Democratic voters, is one of the hottest battlegrounds in the war over solar energy on prime farmland and one of the riskiest counties in the country for developers, according to Heatmap Pro’s database. But Collier had expressed openness to allowing new solar to be built on a case-by-case basis, while Keesee ran on a platform focused almost exclusively on blocking solar development. Collier ultimately placed third in the primary, behind Keesee and another anti-solar candidate placing second.
Fighting solar is a personal issue for Keesee (pronounced keh-see, like “messy”). She has aggressively fought Frasier Solar – a 120 megawatt solar project in the country proposed by Open Road Renewables – getting involved in organizing against the project and regularly attending state regulator hearings. Filings she submitted to the Ohio Power Siting Board state she owns a property at least somewhat adjacent to the proposed solar farm. Based on the sheer volume of those filings this is clearly her passion project – alongside preaching and comparing gay people to Hitler.
Yesterday I spoke to Collier who told me the Frasier Solar project motivated Keesee’s candidacy. He remembered first encountering her at a community meeting – “she verbally accosted me” – and that she “decided she’d run against me because [the solar farm] was going to be next to her house.” In his view, he lost the race because excitement and money combined to produce high anti-solar turnout in a kind of local government primary that ordinarily has low campaign spending and is quite quiet. Some of that funding and activity has been well documented.
“She did it right: tons of ground troops, people from her church, people she’s close with went door-to-door, and they put out lots of propaganda. She got them stirred up that we were going to take all the farmland and turn it into solar,” he said.
Collier’s takeaway from the race was that local commissioner races are particularly vulnerable to the sorts of disinformation, campaign spending and political attacks we’re used to seeing more often in races for higher offices at the state and federal level.
“Unfortunately it has become this,” he bemoaned, “fueled by people who have little to no knowledge of what we do or how we do it. If you stir up enough stuff and you cry out loud enough and put up enough misinformation, people will start to believe it.”
Races like these are happening elsewhere in Ohio and in other states like Georgia, where opposition to a battery plant mobilized Republican primaries. As the climate world digests the federal election results and tries to work backwards from there, perhaps at least some attention will refocus on local campaigns like these.
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Madison County, Missouri – A giant battery material recycling plant owned by Critical Mineral Recovery exploded and became engulfed in flames last week, creating a potential Vineyard Wind-level PR headache for energy storage.
2. Benton County, Washington State – Governor Jay Inslee finally got state approvals finished for Scout Clean Energy’s massive Horse Heaven wind farm after a prolonged battle over project siting, cultural heritage management, and bird habitat.
3. Fulton County, Georgia – A large NextEra battery storage facility outside of Atlanta is facing a lawsuit that commingles usual conflicts over building these properties with environmental justice concerns, I’ve learned.
Here’s what else I’m watching…
In Colorado, Weld County commissioners approved part of one of the largest solar projects in the nation proposed by Balanced Rock Power.
In New Mexico, a large solar farm in Sandoval County proposed by a subsidiary of U.S. PCR Investments on land typically used for cattle is facing consternation.
In Pennsylvania, Schuylkill County commissioners are thinking about new solar zoning restrictions.
In Kentucky, Lost City Renewables is still wrestling with local concerns surrounding a 1,300-acre solar farm in rural Muhlenberg County.
In Minnesota, Ranger Power’s Gopher State solar project is starting to go through the public hearing process.
In Texas, Trina Solar – a company media reports have linked to China – announced it sold a large battery plant the day after the election. It was acquired by Norwegian company FREYR.