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They haven’t even been announced yet, but the idea that they will has sent prices soaring.
China, Canada, Mexico, steel, aluminum, cars, and soon, copper. That’s what the market has concluded following a Bloomberg News report last week that copper tariffs would arrive far sooner than the 270 days President Trump gave the Department of Commerce to conduct its investigation into “dumping” of the metal.
Copper has been dubbed the “metal of electrification,” and demand for it is expected to skyrocket under any reasonable scenario to contain global temperature rise. Even according to a U.S. administration that, at best, neglects climate change considerations, copper is an “essential material for national security, economic strength, and industrial resilience,” as the Trump White House said while announcing its investigation into copper imports.
The effort to boost domestic production of copper did not start with this White House, but it has historically run into the same problems that beset the mining industry: New production can take decades to begin, even after you find the minerals you’re looking for underground. And if demand is not assured — if, for instance, subsidies for electric vehicles filled with copper disappear — then investing in new production could lead to bankruptcy, whereas holding back on new capacity would, at worst, mean forgoing some profits.
The Trump administration and the broader energy and foreign policy community have been, in general, obsessed with rocks — critical minerals, rare earths, and other minerals that are indeed “critical” to much of the economy but are not listed as such. Copper sits somewhere between these categories — while it does not appear on the United States Geological Survey list of critical minerals, which ranges from aluminum and antimony to zinc and zirconium, it does appear on the Department of Energy’s list of “critical materials.”
These lists guide federal data collection efforts, and that data can then get used to guide policymaking. Being on these lists doesn’t guarantee that a related program will get funding, but it does mean that the data is there to draw from should someone need to make a case for why their program should get funding.
This gap between the lists has been a target for Congress, especially for legislators in the Southwest, where much of America’s copper is mined. The discrepancies in the list is essentially a matter of focus for the Energy and Interior Departments — with Energy naturally focused on what’s especially important for energy infrastructure. Getting consistency between the lists, which are only a few years old, will “increase transparency within our federal agencies, ensuring all of our nation’s critical resources are developed, traded, and produced equally, and strengthen our supply chains,” Mike Lee (R-Ut), a sponsor of the Senate version of the legislation, said in a statement.
Trump’s executive order asking for the investigation sought to speed up permitting for new mines — and they’ll need all the help they can get. S&P calculates that the average copper mine takes over 30 years to develop. Rio Tinto and BHP’s Resolution Copper project in Superior, Arizona — which the companies hope will produce 20 million tons of copper — has already sucked up some $2 billion of capital while producing zero copper after about 20 years of legal and political opposition. A proposed copper-nickel mine in Minnesota has alreadyabsorbed around $1 billion worth of investment and is still wrangling over the more than 20 permits it needs.
But for the Trump administration’s strategy of tariffs and expedited permitting to actually work for American copper end users, it will have to lead to an expansion of smelting and recycling, in addition to mining.
Reuters reported last year that the Mexican conglomerate Grupo Mexico would re-open an Arizona smelter, but that has yet to happen (it’s currently a Superfund site). A copper mine in Milford, Utah said last week that it was expanding to meet rising copper demand.
The smelting sector is dominated by China. “The United States has ample copper reserves, yet our smelting and refining capacity lags significantly behind global competitors,” the White House said in its copper executive order in February. China’s dominance, “coupled with global overcapacity and a single producer’s control of world supply chains, poses a direct threat to United States national security and economic stability.”
The United States produces around 1.2 million tons of copper annually from its mines and imports around 900,000 tons, according to the United States Geological Survey. Some of that domestically mined copper — around 375,000 tons worth — ends up being exported for smelting, according to the Copper Development Association.
While the United States is near the top of national copper production (well behind the world leader, Chile, but comparable to other large-scale copper producers such as Indonesia and Australia), it has a meager copper refining industry, with only two active smelters producing around 400,000 tons of copper a year — a fraction of China’s refining capacity — leaving American industry reliant on imports.
The energy industry has been dealing with the copper issue for years. More specifically, it’s worrying about how domestic and global production will be able to keep up with what forecasters anticipate could be massive demand.
That goes not just for copper — it also includes the metals that are mined alongside it. First Solar, the U.S.-based solar manufacturing company, has benefited from tariffs on solar panels put in place during the Biden administration. But while First Solar has been a winner in the renewable energy trade conflict, it is still sensitive to the global trade in commodities. That’s in part because it is also a major consumer of tellurium, a mineral that’s a byproduct of copper mining, and which was the subject of expanded export Chinese export controls announced early last month.
“We have, over the past decade employed a strategic sourcing strategy to diversify our tellurium supply chain to mitigate a sole sourcing position in China and are undertaking additional measures to mitigate dependencies on China for certain products containing to tellurium,” Alexander Bradley, First Solar’s chief financial officer, said in the company’s February earnings call. “While we continue to evaluate [whether] there will be any operational impact from China's decision, this latest development emphasizes the urgent need for the United States to accelerate the strategic development of copper mining and processing of its byproduct materials, including tellurium.”
Electric vehicles are another major user of copper among climate technologies, with EVs having on average around 180 pounds of copper in them, according to the Copper Development Association. Tesla — which will soon be hit by auto tariffs — has been actively trying to reduce its copper consumption. Meanwhile Rivian, one of Tesla’s primary domestic competitors, announced last year that it would cut its production targets dramatically due to what turned out to be a supplier communication snafu for a copper component of its motors.
“We’re very bullish on copper prices,” Kathleen Quirk, chief executive officer of Freeport-McMoRan, which runs a number of U.S. copper mines (and a smelter, to boot), said at a financial conference in February. With boosts in demand coming from “power generation, new power generation investments, multibillion-dollar investments in infrastructure and energy infrastructure, it's going to be very positive for copper.”
Copper prices paid by American manufacturers have been rising for the past five months, according to the monthly PMI survey. Prices in New York reached record highs last week, hitting almost $12,000 per ton as the industry tried to beat the almost-certainly-inevitable tariffs, according to an ING analyst report released last week.
The actual imposition of the tariffs would constitute a “further upside risk to copper prices” — in other words, prices will continue to climb, according to the ING analysts. “The U.S. copper rush could leave the rest of the world tight on copper if demand picks up more quickly than expected,” the ING analysts wrote.
Copper futures have shot up this year by around 25%, leading to profits for those who mine it — especially in the United States.
From the perspective of Freeport-McMoRan, the market gyrations so far have generally been to the upside, with the premium on copper in the U.S. “helping us from that perspective of generating higher revenues for our U.S. price copper,” Quirk said at the conference. But the domestic copper industry as a whole does not see tariffs as the sole way to increase copper production.
“The U.S. will need an all-of-the-above sourcing strategy to secure a stable supply for domestic use. This must include increased mining in the U.S., increased smelting and refining in the U.S., enhanced recycling, keeping more copper scrap within U.S. borders, and continued trade with reliable partners to maintain the flow of critical raw material feedstocks for domestic use,” Copper Development Association chief executive Adam Estelle told me in an emailed statement.
And tariffs can come in faster than new mines and smelters can be built or their capacity expanded. American mining projects have been mired in decades of permitting delays and negotiations with local communities not because there isn’t a market opportunity for new copper, but because it just takes a very long time to open a mine.
Even as she was celebrating Freeport-McMoRan’s robust outlook, CEO Kathleen Quirk noted that “at the same time, it's become more and more difficult to develop new supplies of copper.”
That goes especially for industries related to renewable energy, where copper finds itself into grid equipment, solar panels, and wind turbines. Even so, they’ve been wary of talking about an impending tariff directly.
A number of trade groups, including the Zero Emission Transportation Association, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, and the Solar Energy Industries Association, hailed an executive order aiming to accelerate critical minerals production released March 20. When I asked about copper tariffs, however, a ZETA spokesperson referred me to an earlier statement decrying trade conflict with Canada and Mexico, saying that “imposing tariffs on allies and trading partners like Canada and Mexico — both of which play a significant role in the North American automotive supply chain — will increase costs to consumers and make it more difficult to attract investment into our communities.”
Meanwhile, NEMA’s vice president of public affairs, Spencer Pederson, told me in an emailed statement that “any new trade policies must provide predictability and certainty for future domestic investments and businesses.”
Other manufacturing-centric industries that use copper aren’t thrilled about the prospect of tariffs, either. A spokesperson for the National Association of Manufacturers referred me to its recent survey showing that the top two concerns among its members were “trade uncertainties,” feared by more than three quarters of respondents, and “increased raw material costs,” which worried 60% of respondents. While NAM is broadly supportive of many Trump administration goals, especially around extending the 2017 tax cuts, it has called for a “commonsense manufacturing strategy” which includes “making way for exemptions for critical inputs.” That runs against the Trump administration’s preference for big, obvious tariffs.
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Excise tax is out, foreign sourcing rules are in.
After more than three days of stops and starts on the Senate floor, Congress’ upper chamber finally passed its version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act Tuesday morning, sending the tax package back to the House in hopes of delivering it to Trump by the July 4 holiday, as promised.
An amendment brought by Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that would have more gradually phased down the tax credits for wind and solar rather than abruptly cutting them off was never brought to the floor. Instead, Murkowski struck a deal with the Senate leadership designed to secure her vote that accomplished some of her other priorities, including funding for rural hospitals, while also killing an excise tax on renewables that had only just been stuffed into the bill over the weekend.
The new tax on wind and solar would have driven up development costs by as much as 20% — a prospect that industry groups said would “kill” investment altogether. But even without the tax, the Senate’s bill would gum up the works for clean energy projects across the spectrum due to new phase-out schedules for tax credits and fast-approaching deadlines to meet complex foreign sourcing rules. While more projects will likely be built under this version than the previous one, the basic outcomes haven’t changed: higher energy costs, project delays, lost jobs, and ceding leadership in artificial intelligence and manufacturing to China.
"This bill will hit Americans hard, terminating credits that have helped families lower their energy and transportation costs, shrinking demand for American-made advanced energy technologies, and squeezing new domestic energy production at a time of rising demand and prices,” Heather O’Neill, the CEO and president of the trade group Advanced Energy United, said in a statement Tuesday. “The advanced energy industry will endure, but the downstream effects of these rollbacks and punitive policies will be felt by American families and businesses for years to come.”
Here’s what’s in the final Senate bill.
The final Senate bill bifurcates the previously technology-neutral tax credits for clean electricity into two categories with entirely different rules and timelines — wind and solar versus everything else.
Tax credits for wind and solar farms would end abruptly with no phase-out period, but the bill includes a significant safe harbor for projects that are already under construction or close to breaking ground. As long as a project starts construction within 12 months of the bill’s passage, it will be able to claim the tax credits as originally laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act. All other projects must be “placed in service,” i.e. begin operating, by the start of 2028 to qualify.
That means if Trump signs the bill into law on July 4, wind and solar developers will have until July 4 of 2026 to “start construction.” Otherwise, they will have less than a year and a half to bring their projects online and still qualify for the credits.
Meanwhile, all other sources of zero-emissions electricity, including batteries, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and hydropower, will be able to continue claiming the tax credits for nearly a decade. The credits would start phasing down for projects that start construction in 2034 and terminate in 2036.
While there are some potential wins in the bill for clean energy development, many of the safe harbored projects will still be subject to complex foreign sourcing rules that may prove too much of a burden to meet.
The bill requires that any zero-emissions electricity or advanced manufacturing project that starts construction after December of this year abide by strict new “foreign entities of concern,” or FEOC rules in order to be eligible for tax credits. The rules penalize companies for having financial or material connections to people or businesses that are “owned by, controlled by, or subject to the jurisdiction or direction of” any of four countries — Russia, Iran, North Korea, and most importantly for clean energy technology, China.
As with the text that came out of the Senate Finance committee, the text in the final bill would phase in supply chain restrictions, requiring project developers and manufacturers to use fewer and fewer Chinese-sourced inputs over time. For clean electricity projects starting construction next year, 40% of the value of the materials used in the project must be free of ties to a FEOC. By 2030, the threshold would rise to 60%. Energy storage facilities are subject to a more aggressive timeline and would be required to prove that 55% of the project materials are non-FEOC in 2026, rising to 75% by 2030. Each covered advanced manufacturing technology gets its own specific FEOC benchmarks.
Unlike the text from the Finance Committee, however, the final text includes a clear exception for developers who already have procurement contracts in place prior to the bill’s enactment. If a solar developer has already signed a contract to get its cells from a Chinese company, for example, it could exempt that cost from the calculation. That would make it easier for companies further along in the development process to comply with the eligibility rules.
That said, these materials sourcing rules come on top of strict ownership and licensing rules likely to block more than 100 existing and planned solar and battery factories with partial Chinese ownership or licensing deals with Chinese firms from receiving the tax credits, per a BloombergNEF analysis I reported on previously.
Once again, the details of how any of this will work — and whether it will, in fact, be “workable” — will depend heavily on guidance written by the Treasury department. That not only gives the Trump administration significant discretion over the rules, it also assumes that the nTreasury department, which is now severely understaffed after Trump’s efficiency department cleaned house earlier this year, will actually have the bandwidth to write them. Without Treasury guidance, developers may not have the cost certainty they need to continue moving forward on projects.
Up until today, the Senate and House looked poised to destroy the business model for companies like Sunrun that lease rooftop solar installations to homeowners and businesses by cutting them off from the investment tax credit, which can bring down the cost of a solar array by as much as 70%. The final Senate bill, however, got rid of this provision and replaced it with a much more narrow version.
Now, the only “leasing” schemes that are barred from claiming tax credits are those for solar water heaters and small wind installations. Companies that lease solar panels, batteries, fuel cells, and geothermal heating equipment are still eligible. SunRun’s stock jumped nearly 10 percentage points on Tuesday.
Other than the new FEOC rules, which will have truly existential consequences for a great many projects, there aren’t many changes to the advanced manufacturing tax credit, or 45X, than in previous versions of the bill. The OBBBA would create a new phase-out schedule for critical mineral producers claiming the tax credit that begins in 2031. Previously, critical minerals were set to be eligible indefinitely. It would also terminate the credit for wind energy components early, in 2028.
One significant change from the Senate Finance text is that the bill would allow vertically integrated companies to stack the tax credit for multiple components.
But perhaps the biggest change, which was introduced last weekend, is a twisted new definition of “critical mineral” that allows metallurgical coal — the type of coal used in steelmaking — to qualify for the tax credit. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote, most of the metallurgical coal the U.S. produces is exported, meaning this subsidy will mostly help other countries produce cheaper steel.
It looks like the hydrogen industry’s intense lobbying efforts finally paid off: The final Senate bill is the first text we’ve seen since this process began in May that would extend the lifespan of the tax credit for clean hydrogen production. Now, projects that begin construction before January 1, 2028 will still qualify for the credit. This is shorter than the Inflation Reduction Act’s 2033 cut-off, but much longer than the end-of-year cliff earlier versions of the bill would have imposed.
The tax credits for electric vehicles and energy efficiency building improvements would end almost immediately. Consumers will have to purchase or lease a new or used EV before September 30, 2025, in order to benefit. There would be a slightly longer lead time to get an EV charger installed, but that credit (30C) would expire on June 30, 2026.
Meanwhile, energy efficiency upgrades such as installing a heat pump or better-insulated windows and doors would have to be completed by the end of this year in order to qualify. Same goes for self-financed rooftop solar. The tax credit for newly built energy efficiency homes would expire on June 30, 2026.
The bill would make similar changes to the carbon sequestration (45Q) and clean fuels (45Z) tax credits as previous versions, boosting the credit amount for carbon capture projects that do enhanced oil recovery, and extending the clean fuels credit to corn ethanol producers.
The House Rules Committee met on Tuesday afternoon shortly after the Senate vote to deliberate on whether to send it to the House floor, and is still debating as of press time. So far, Rules members Ralph Norman and Chip Roy have said they’ll vote against it.
On sparring in the Senate, NEPA rules, and taxing first-class flyers
Current conditions: A hurricane warning is in effect for Mexico as the Category 1 storm Flossie approaches • More than 50,000 people have been forced to flee wildfires raging in Turkey • Heavy rain caused flash floods and landslides near a mountain resort in northern Italy during peak tourist season.
Senate lawmakers’ vote-a-rama on the GOP tax and budget megabill dragged into Monday night and continues Tuesday. Republicans only have three votes to lose if they want to get the bill through the chamber and send it to the House. Already Senators Thom Tillis and Rand Paul are expected to vote against it, and there are a few more holdouts for whom clean energy appears to be one sticking point. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, has put forward an amendment (together with Iowa Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley) that would eliminate the new renewables excise tax, and phase out tax credits for solar and wind gradually (by 2028) rather than immediately, as proposed in the original bill. “I don’t want us to backslide on the clean energy credits,” Murkowski told reporters Monday. E&E News reported that the amendment could be considered on a simple majority threshold. (As an aside: If you’re wondering why wind and solar need tax credits if they’re so cheap, as clean energy advocates often emphasize, Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo has a nice explainer worth reading.)
At the same time, Utah’s Senator John Curtis has proposed an amendment that tweaks the new excise tax to make it more “flexible.” The amendments are “setting up a major intra-party fight,” Politicoreported, adding that “fiscal hawks on both sides of the Capitol are warning they will oppose the bill if the phase-outs of Inflation Reduction Act provisions are watered down.” Senators have already defeated amendments proposed by Democrats Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and John Hickenlooper of Colorado to defend clean energy and residential solar tax credits, respectively. The session has broken the previous record for most votes in a vote-a-rama, set in 2008, with no end in sight.
The Department of Energy on Monday rolled back most of its regulations relating to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, and published a new set of guidance procedures in their place. The longstanding NEPA law requires that the government study the environmental impacts of its actions, and in the case of the DOE, this meant things like permitting and public lands management. In a press release outlining the changes, the agency said it was “fixing the broken permitting process and delivering on President Trump’s pledge to unleash American energy dominance and accelerate critical energy infrastructure.” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said the agency was cutting red tape to end permitting paralysis. “Build, baby, build!” he said.
Nearly 300 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency signed a letter addressed to EPA head Lee Zeldin declaring their dissent toward the Trump administration’s policies. The letter accuses the administration of:
“Going forward, you have the opportunity to correct course,” the letter states. “Should you choose to do so, we stand ready to support your efforts to fulfill EPA’s mission.” It’s signed by more than 420 people, 270 being EPA workers. Many of them asked to sign anonymously. In a statement to The New York Times, EPA spokesperson Carolyn Horlan said “the Trump EPA will continue to work with states, tribes and communities to advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment and administrator Zeldin’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative, which includes providing clean air, land and water for EVERY American.”
At the fourth International Conference on Financing for Development taking place in Spain this week, a group of eight countries including France and Spain announced they’re banding together in an effort to tax first- and business-class flyers as well as private jets to raise money for climate mitigation and sustainable development. “The aim is to help improve green taxation and foster international solidarity by promoting more progressive and harmonised tax systems,” the office of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said in a statement. Other countries in the coalition include Kenya, Barbados, Somalia, Benin, Sierra Leone, and Antigua & Barbuda. The group said it will “work towards COP30 on a better contribution of the aviation sector to fair transitions and resilience.” Wopke Hoekstra, who heads up the European Commission for Climate, called for other countries to join the group in the lead-up to COP30 in November.
In case you missed it: Google announced on Monday that it intends to buy fusion energy from nuclear startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Of course, CFS will have to crack commercial-scale fusion first (minor detail!), but as The Wall Street Journal noted, the news is significant because it is “the first direct deal between a customer and a fusion energy company.” Google will buy 200 megawatts of energy supplied by CFS’s ARC plant in Virginia. “It’s a pretty big signal to the market that fusion’s coming,” CFS CEO Bob Mumgaard told the Journal. “It’s desirable, and that people are gonna work together to make it happen.” Google’s head of advanced energy Michael Terrell echoed that sentiment, saying the company hopes this move will “prove out and scale a promising pathway toward commercial fusion power.” CFS, which is backed by Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, aims to produce commercial fusion energy in the 2030s.
All the public property owned by Britain’s King Charles earned a net profit of £1.15 billion ($1.58 billion) last year. The biggest source of income? Offshore wind leases.
It’s the largest facility of its kind of Europe and will immediately make the lithium-sulfur battery startup a major player.
Lyten, the domestic lithium-sulfur battery company, has officially expanded into the European market, announcing that it has acquired yet another shuttered Northvolt facility. Located in Gdansk, Poland, this acquisition represents a new direction for the company: Rather than producing battery cells — as Lyten’s other U.S.-based facilities will do — this 270,000 square foot plant is designed to produce complete battery energy storage systems for the grid. Currently, it’s the largest energy storage manufacturing facility in Europe, with enough equipment to ramp up to 6 gigawatt-hours of capacity. This gives Lyten the ability to become — practically immediately — a major player in energy storage.
“We were very convinced that we needed to be able to build our own battery energy storage systems, so the full system with electronics and switch gear and safety systems and everything for our batteries to go into,” Keith Norman, Lyten’s chief sustainability and marketing officer, told me. “So this opportunity became very, very well aligned with our strategy.”
The well-funded startup has been negotiating this transaction — which is expected to close in the third quarter — since Northvolt’s bankruptcy proceedings got underway at the end of last year. It marks the second time the company has snatched up an old Northvolt asset, the first being a Bay Area-based plant capable of producing 200 megawatt-hours of batteries that’s expected to begin operations late this year.
Lithium-sulfur batteries are an emerging technology yet to be deployed at scale. This chemistry — if perfected — has the potential to be much higher energy-density than lithium-ion, and doesn’t require costly critical minerals prone to supply chain volatility such as nickel, manganese, cobalt, and graphite. These are all key elements of lithium-ion batteries and are primarily refined in China, whereas sulfur — the key material in lithium-sulfur batteries — is cheap and abundant around the world. Right now, the Poland facility is set up to produce lithium-ion energy storage systems, but once it starts switching over production lines, it will become likely the first in the world to manufacture lithium-sulfur systems at scale.
Until now, Lyten has only owned assets in the U.S., touting that it sources “well over 80%” of its core battery components domestically. But according to Norman, the startup has always looked to Europe as another key market, as its focus revolves around building local supply chains, not just a U.S.-centric one. “We have a vision to be able to have both battery manufacturing and energy storage manufacturing in the U.S. and in Europe, so that we can localize both supply chains,” he explained to me.
In the short-term, however, the company will continue to build its battery capacity in the U.S., including a a gigafactory in Reno planned for 2027, while it focuses on energy storage in Europe. U.S.-made batteries will supply the Poland facility until Lyten’s hypothetical future Europe-based battery factories can ramp, Norman explained.
Immediately after the deal closes, Lyten will restart manufacturing in order to meet Northvolt’s preexisting contracts for lithium-ion systems. Then throughout this year and next, the startup will work to integrate its own lithium-sulfur production lines, ultimately offering customers both lithium-sulfur and lithium-ion energy storage options. The goal is to produce a gigawatt-hour of system capacity by sometime next year.
Offering two distinct energy storage systems reliant on different battery chemistries will work to Lyten’s advantage, Norman told me via email, giving the company “an incredible amount of flexibility to navigate market uncertainty, supply chain uncertainty, geopolitical uncertainty, and varied customer demands.”
The company’s eagerness to acquire shuttered facilities isn’t driven by turbulence in the current political climate, Norman said, but rather by “opportunistic” market circumstances. Yet I also can’t help but notice that this would be a promising way for Lyten to cost-effectively scale at a time when, Norman said, it’s still taking a “wait and see” approach to tariffs and other fluctuating policies that stand to impact the domestic buildout of energy infrastructure.
When I spoke with Norman back in April, right after Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs came into effect, he expressed concern over how they could lead to spiraling construction costs. Levies on steel and aluminum, for example, now stand at 50%, while imports from China are still subject to cumulative tariffs of at least 54%. As Norman told me then, “the energy transition is a manufacturing transition,” and Lyten itself is “a hard tech company that needs to build a lot of infrastructure.”
So while the finances of the Poland factory acquisition aren’t public, it’s probably safe to assume that scooping up prebuilt infrastructure from a defunct business, taking over production of tried-and-true lithium-ion-based technologies, and expanding into international markets are all cheap and prudent options in this economy.
In terms of demand for energy storage, Norman also mentioned that the market is hotter in Europe right now than in the U.S., making it an optimal place to kick off its new product line. The company expects to sell storage systems from the Poland plant into a variety of other international markets, as well. In December of last year, Lyten announced that it had received letters of interest from the U.S. Export-Import Bank totalling $650 million in financing to deploy lithium-sulfur energy storage systems in the Caribbean and other developing economies.
As the company expands, it’s on the hunt for even more facilities to grab. “We continue to see assets becoming available or potential capital investments that have already been made in battery manufacturing assets that are potentially coming on the market,” Norman told me. He’s got his eyes on all of it. “That’s a real big priority for us.”