WEIRTON, West Virginia — On a recent May day, some 235 people gathered from across the country in a vacant lot on the banks of the Ohio River. Behind the tent where they mingled under radiant blue skies, excavators crunched into the earth, gnawing at the remains of a demolished steel plant that had sat quiet since 2005. 

This was the groundbreaking ceremony for Form Energy, a cleantech startup based in Berkeley, California and Somerville, Massachusetts, whose leaders chose this historic steel town in the far northern panhandle of West Virginia for their first commercial-scale factory. A century ago, townspeople here took iron ore shipped along the Ohio River and threw it in furnaces with West Virginia coal to forge steel. The molten slag made the night sky glow red.

Now Form Energy is building an 800,000-square-foot factory to manufacture iron-air batteries that can store energy for days on end, turning wind and solar power into reliable baseload energy sources, a potential breakthrough in the quest for a carbon-free grid.

“If you’d have come here 30, 40 years ago, you wouldn’t have seen a vacant lot — everything was filled with manufacturing of some sort,” said Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, in a speech to the crowd. ​“Steel was being made at the rate nothing has ever seen.”

West Virginia mined the coal that made the steel that built the guns and ships for the American war effort in World War II, Manchin told the audience. But that legacy couldn’t preserve the steel mill — once the state’s largest employer and taxpayer — when deindustrialization kicked in and America shipped its manufacturing jobs overseas. In a lot adjacent to the field where the ceremony was held, train flatcars still carry shiny spools of steel made elsewhere; Weirton’s remaining steel operation just puts the finishing touches on those products.

“We did everything the country asked us to do,” Manchin said. ​“And I guarantee it: We felt like we were left behind.”

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special coverage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s first year.

The U.S. clean energy revolution must be (mostly) Made in America.

At least, that’s what the text of the country’s record-shattering climate law says. Indeed, much of the $391 billion (or more) in climatetech funding in the Inflation Reduction Act can be disbursed only when the product in question — be it an electric vehicle, a sprawling solar array or the whirring blade of a wind turbine — is made at least partially in the U.S. The legislation is literally paying companies to manufacture their products domestically, all in service of making the country more self-sufficient regarding clean energy. 

This policy has rapidly shifted the economic viability of building clean energy equipment in the U.S., attracting tens of billions of dollars in private investment from both domestic and foreign firms hoping to capitalize on the clean energy boom. 

“What has taken place as a result of and since the Inflation Reduction Act can simply not be overstated,” said Aaron Brickman, senior principal in the U.S. program of clean energy think tank RMI. ​“The United States is effectively now the most attractive destination for global capital in clean energy and cleantech.” (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)

More than 100 new clean energy manufacturing facilities or factory expansions were announced in the U.S. since President Biden signed the law last August, adding up to nearly $80 billion in new investment, according to Canary Media analysis. In fact, in the two months since we initially published this piece, we’ve counted an additional 20 battery, EV, solar and wind manufacturing projects that have been announced across the U.S.

Companies have so far gravitated toward a handful of states to build their production facilities. Much of this activity is concentrated east of the Mississippi, in a geographic stretch spanning from the Great Lakes to Georgia that has been dubbed the ​“Battery Belt.” While Michigan’s historic grip on the auto industry is still reflected in the battery and EV production plans announced so far, the South has become a bustling hub for the industry as well. 

Solar manufacturing is headed for the South, too. Planned factories are concentrated in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, with some also coming to Ohio and solar giant Texas. 

Another 12 clean energy manufacturing projects that account for more than $8.5 billion in investment have been announced but don’t have a location yet, so those are not shown in the map above.

According to RMI’s Brickman, some of the leading states have courted clean-energy manufacturing investment with an array of tactics, such as providing state-level tax incentives, ensuring the availability of shovel-ready sites, training workers and investing in infrastructure.

South Carolina, for example, advertises itself as an EV industry destination, in part because of the 75,000 people already employed in the automotive industry in the state. And in Georgia — the state currently on track to get the most investment in clean energy manufacturing — officials have touted low taxes, good universities, workforce development and, to the dismay of labor groups like the United Auto Workers, low unionization rates. 

The geographic proximity of these facilities will likely yield other benefits, such as cheaper transportation from manufacturing sites to assembly plants. Production clusters in the Battery Belt and the South are also likely to benefit from a growing trained workforce and emerging educational programs intended to meet the hiring demand. 

At least so far, most of the manufacturing investments look likely to go to communities represented by Republican lawmakers in Congress, all of whom voted against the Inflation Reduction Act. 

The U.S. clean energy boom is a global affair

Impressive as this state-spanning explosion in clean energy manufacturing may be, it’s not happening without some serious help from abroad. In fact, it’s not currently possible for the U.S. to meet its lofty Made-in-America goals without relying heavily on clean energy tech and investment from firms based outside of the country.

U.S.-based companies account for less than half of the clean energy manufacturing announcements made since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, and just about one-third of the promised investment dollars. 

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

Lee County sits at the southeasternmost point of Iowa, wedged between Missouri and Illinois and bordering the Mississippi River. About one in four jobs in this rural county of 33,000 people is in manufacturing, with workers producing everything from canned sausages, chewing-gum sweetener and popcorn tins to fertilizer, printer ink and weather strips for car doors. Until last year, Lee County also made the swooping 200-foot-long blades that spin atop wind turbines.

Wind power is the largest source of U.S. renewable electricity generation, providing over 10 percent of the country’s total electricity every year — up from just 3.5 percent a decade ago. In recent years, however, the development of new wind farms has significantly slowed, weakening demand for giant blades and towers and a litany of smaller components.

In June 2022, Siemens Gamesa, one of the world’s top wind turbine manufacturers, put its Lee County facility into ​“hibernation,” leaving 171 people without work. Another 92 employees lost their jobs at a facility in Hutchinson, Kansas, where Siemens Gamesa made the nacelles that sit on turbine towers and hold mechanical components. The company cited the ​“current challenges in the U.S. onshore wind market” in making its decision to stop production at both sites.

Dennis Fraise likened the Iowa layoffs to ​“the air running out of a balloon — that’s what it feels like to the community and the region.”

Fraise is the CEO of the Lee County Economic Development Group, a public-private partnership. He said that, when the blade plant stopped running in the city of Fort Madison, the local businesses that supplied uniforms, provided food services and performed maintenance work also felt the blow. Lee County’s population has been steadily shrinking since the 1970s as residents move to nearby cities and seek jobs in other sectors.

“Anytime a plant has a disruption, it has an impact on our whole economy,” he told Canary Media. ​“It’s still a great place to live,” he added, ​“but it’s deflating.”

Now, however, the downturn facing the U.S. wind industry is beginning to reverse itself, thanks in large part to the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law last August. The sweeping legislation dedicates at least $390 billion over 10 years to accelerate investments in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and tackle climate change. The law is expected to significantly boost deployments of wind, solar and battery-storage systems while also creating and expanding supply chains to make those clean-energy technologies at home.

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

The push to make clean energy products in the U.S. is projected to create a staggering 900,000 new manufacturing jobs over the next 10 years. That’s a vast need former coal miners can help fulfill. 

As cheaper and cleaner energy sources displace coal in the U.S., coal miners are losing their livelihoods. The industry has shed more than half of its workforce, or about 50,000 jobs, since 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But the ramp-up of domestic clean energy manufacturing and the critical-mineral supply chain for renewables could be a lifeline for these displaced and dislocated miners. And in turn, the clean energy manufacturing sector could get a boost by sourcing talent from an experienced pool of energy workers, of which miners are one prominent example. 

That’s all the more likely now that the Biden administration and Congress have passed the Inflation Reduction Act, according to Phil Smith, chief of staff of the United Mine Workers of America, the largest union representing coal miners in North America. The law, which is the biggest clean energy investment in U.S. history, contains billions of dollars to support a just transition for coal miners and designated energy communities. Key provisions include:

• At least $4 billion of investment in energy projects sited in coal communities under the Advanced Energy Project investment tax credit, or 48C. 
• $250 billion in loans to energy infrastructure projects that repurpose fossil energy sites, including former coal mines. 
• A lucrative 10 percent bonus tax credit to clean energy developers and manufacturers that locate in energy communities, including those that have historically relied on coal.

Smith told us the approach is a stark contrast with that taken by previous administrations — and it’s making a material difference. Clean energy manufacturers and suppliers have been reaching out to the union, signaling that they’re interested in coming to coal communities and hiring dislocated miners, Smith told Canary Media. 

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

Flush with a fresh injection of generous federal incentives, the U.S. solar industry is betting billions on scaling up homegrown manufacturing and reversing its reliance on foreign suppliers.

Solar is the fastest-growing form of electricity generation in the U.S., but that pace of growth has only been possible with the help of tens of millions of imported solar panels. Most of these panels are manufactured (at least partially) in China, a country the U.S. is increasingly at odds with and which Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike want to reduce dependence on — especially when it comes to the rapidly unfolding energy transition. 

A robust and vertically integrated domestic solar industry would allow the U.S. to have reliable suppliers ​“that we can count on, where your supply isn’t going to be disrupted every two to three years in a major way,” said Justin Baca, VP of markets and research at the Solar Energy Industries Association. Today’s solar industry is intermittently immobilized by tariff-driven trade squabbles, Baca said, like last year’s back-and-forth over potential punitive tariffs affecting the Southeast Asian nations from which the U.S. sources most of its solar panels. 

In a dramatic policy turn last year, the Biden administration put a two-year pause on imposing any new import tariffs on solar products, which would have stopped U.S. solar deployment in its tracks. Months later, the administration also provided the carrot of the Inflation Reduction Act’s billions in incentives for domestically manufactured solar hardware. 

But there’s still a bipartisan appetite in Congress to impose tariffs on solar panels from Southeast Asia as soon as next year — a move that only makes sense for the energy transition if the U.S. is able to meet all of its own solar manufacturing needs by then.

So can homegrown solar production, turbocharged by the Inflation Reduction Act, supplant that imported hardware anytime soon? 

The solar supply gap

Here’s the problem: Right now, the U.S. cannot manufacture anything close to enough solar to meet its own installation needs. 

In 2022, the U.S. produced a paltry 5 gigawatts of solar panels or modules, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, while importing 29 gigawatts of modules from China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. 

And with the pace of solar installations projected to surge, the challenge of scaling manufacturing to match that demand isn’t going to get any easier. 

While 17 gigawatts of total solar capacity was installed in the U.S. last year, according to the Department of Energy, a whopping 358 gigawatts of new solar capacity is expected to be deployed between 2023 and 2030, driven by the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the latest New Energy Outlook from BloombergNEF. Annual installations could balloon to more than 100 gigawatts per year by 2030, according to some projections.

Some help is on the way, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act. Since the landmark law was enacted last August, 27 new solar manufacturing facilities have been announced in the U.S. But in the best-case scenario, these announcements still won’t close the gap between projected supply and demand for solar panels in the coming years — and the best-case scenario is rarely the one that unfolds.

Challenging Chinese solar dominance

Although America’s IRA-inspired solar manufacturing plans are ambitious, they’re absolutely put to shame by the scale of China’s solar manufacturing.

The U.S. was the first to commercialize solar panels, but over the last two decades, its solar-production expertise migrated to Japan, then Germany and ultimately to China, despite protectionist tariffs imposed during the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. (This is a good case for the ineffectiveness of trade tariffs.)

Now, China is the dominant global solar supplier by far, and home to 70 to 98 percent of the world’s production capacity for the silicon-based materials and components in PV panels, according to S&P Global. Meanwhile, the U.S. currently has just over 2 percent of the world’s photovoltaic module production capacity — 11 gigawatts out of a global total of more than 500 gigawatts in 2023, according to energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

And while the heftiest solar-manufacturing additions in the U.S. are coming in 3-gigawatt chunks, new facilities in China are orders of magnitude larger, with numerous 20- and 30-gigawatt factories in the works from vendors such as Longi, Jinko and Trina.

The country’s dominance poses a significant problem for the U.S. energy transition as politicians on both sides of the aisle step up anti-China rhetoric, both in general and specifically about the solar supply chain. 

Senator Sherrod Brown (D), whose state of Ohio is home to U.S. solar manufacturing heavyweight First Solar, has a particularly strong opinion on the matter. ​“The Chinese government will do anything to undermine American manufacturing, and would like nothing more than to kill the American solar manufacturing industry before it takes off,” he said. “[T]he Inflation Reduction Act…allows us to fight back.”

The solar coaster

Now here’s a promising development for homegrown solar: There has been approximately 70 gigawatts’ worth of U.S. solar panel factory announcements since the passage of the IRA last August, according to SEIA’s Justin Baca. 

There’s a good reason for that: The IRA provides generous tax credits for the domestic production of solar cells, modules and components. Manufacturers will be eligible for a credit of 11 to 18 cents per watt for a solar module manufactured in a U.S.-based, vertically integrated plant, meaning all components are sourced in the U.S. Subsidies will apply across the solar value chain of polysilicon feedstock, thin-film or crystalline PV cells, wafers and modules, and will cover about half the cost of manufacturing a solar module.

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

Tax credits are the mechanism driving the nascent U.S. clean energy manufacturing boom. The Inflation Reduction Act has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits for companies that make solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and other key technologies in the U.S., as well as for companies that mine, process, recycle and put together the constituent components of these vital building blocks for a decarbonized U.S. economy. 

The flood of investment in this domestic cleantech renaissance is startling and unprecedented, as we cover in our special series, with multibillion-dollar projects being announced on almost a weekly basis. Over $70 billion in clean-technology manufacturing investment was announced between the law’s passage and the end of May, Canary Media found. Some analysts project that the flow of federal tax credits for making and deploying clean energy in the U.S. could exceed $1 trillion through 2040.

But beneath the surface, disagreements are simmering about how the federal government should write the rules that will determine which projects are eligible for tax credits and which are not. One big dispute: What should count as ​“made in America” for a key tax credit that rewards the use of domestic material in renewable energy projects? 

The underlying tension is that the Biden administration wants to do two challenging things simultaneously. One, it wants to quickly deploy a massive amount of clean energy technologies. Two, it wants to quickly build up the domestic industries that are manufacturing those clean energy technologies. 

The Inflation Reduction Act includes a host of federal tax credits, grant programs and loan guarantees to boost capital investment to help U.S. manufacturers compete on the international stage. The keystone of these supply-side incentives — or incentives aimed at boosting domestic production capacity — is the 45X production tax credit, which is available to producers of solar, battery, inverter, wind and input materials. These tax credits were designed to make U.S.-made products cost-competitive with foreign products — and in the case of solar and batteries, specifically Chinese products. The Treasury Department is gradually releasing rules for how these and other IRA tax credits will be implemented.

But some companies investing in making solar and battery technologies in the U.S. fear that these supply-side tax credits aren’t enough on their own. And they warn that proposed federal guidance on a key IRA policy meant to encourage U.S. companies and consumers to buy U.S.-made products — a 10 percent boost or ​“adder” to the tax credits for deploying clean energy and batteries for projects that use domestic content — may be too weak to prevent Chinese competition from flooding the market with underpriced products. 

Conversely, companies deploying the technologies, such as clean-energy project developers, say that the new domestic-content rules from Treasury risk choking off the supply of affordable products needed to enable rapid clean-energy growth. They point out that it will take years to develop the U.S. supply of key segments of the solar and battery supply chains, and argue that it may do more harm than good to penalize domestically made end products like solar panels and batteries that can’t currently be built without foreign-made materials or components. 

Trying to find the balance between these competing priorities is where things get complicated. ​“You need both of these to work,” said Mike Carr, who helped develop the solar-manufacturing production-tax-credit legislation that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act’s 45X tax-credit program. He’s a former Obama-era deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Energy and former senior counsel for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. 

Now, as executive director of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition, he’s worried that Treasury’s rules may be leaning too far in the direction of placating companies that want looser ​“Made in America” standards to increase the number of products eligible for domestic-content tax credits. Carr believes this approach could irreparably harm a U.S. solar manufacturing supply chain still in its infancy. 

Carr points out that the value of the 45X tax credits begins to phase down in 2030; the program terminates at the end of 2032. That gives U.S. manufacturers limited runway to get up to speed and gain a foothold against foreign competition that’s already invested hundreds of billions of dollars in production capacity. 

“With solar and batteries, you have to recognize that China has a multi-decade and multi-hundreds of billions of dollars of investment head start,” Carr said. 

Is the supply-side boost enough? 

To be clear, the 45X tax credits supporting U.S.-based manufacturers are already driving a historic wave of investment from companies trying to propel solar, wind and battery manufacturing in the U.S.

“It’s been a huge accelerant,” said Scott Moskowitz, head of market strategy and public affairs for Qcells, the South Korea–based solar manufacturer that’s investing $2.5 billion in U.S. factories, including the country’s first plant that will turn raw polysilicon into finished solar cells. U.S. solar manufacturing investment since the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage has dramatically outpaced investment over the previous decade, he said. 

Just how valuable these tax credits can be is laid out in the latest earnings report from First Solar, one of the few U.S.-based solar-panel companies with significant existing domestic manufacturing capacity as well as plans to invest $1.2 billion in expanding it. As part of its first-quarter 2023 earnings report in April, First Solar revealed that it expects to earn from $660 million to $710 million in 45X tax credits — nearly 90 percent of its forecasted operating income for the entire year. 

Similarly generous 45X tax credits for the production of solar inverters and for batteries and their constituent materials have spurred huge levels of investment in those sectors as well. 

It’s obvious that the 45X tax credits are already working to bring new manufacturing capacity to the U.S. But it’s less clear how the 10 percent tax-credit adder for clean energy projects using U.S.-made equipment and materials will influence the growth of the solar and battery industries.

Daniel Wolf, policy manager at the American Council on Renewable Energy, is optimistic. ​“I do think the 45X really will work in tandem with the 10 percent domestic-content adder. I think that’s how the people who wrote the IRA envisioned it as well — the domestic-content provision creating demand and 45X creating supply.” 

The question of whether domestic-content rules will be effective in spurring production of the raw materials and components that make up solar panels and batteries is causing a schism among certain sectors of the U.S. clean technology industry. It’s come to a head with the Treasury Department’s issuance of guidance last month on how the domestic-content credits for clean-energy and energy-storage projects built in the U.S. will work. 

Solar project developers can tap a 30 percent investment tax credit available for clean energy projects, and they’re eager to add the extra 10 percent bonus for using domestically produced equipment on top. That adder is an important piece of the domestic-manufacturing incentive structure, according to Carr of the Solar Energy Manufacturers for America Coalition. ​“You want as many years of 45X as you can get, but it’s not the sustaining proposition. Once [a manufacturing facility is] built here, there needs to be an incentive to keep those jobs here.” 

So the fine print in the rules about what makes a product eligible to qualify as ​“domestic content” is vitally important. According to Carr’s group, last month’s Treasury guidance falls short on that front. 

To win the tax credit, the guidance requires 40 percent of manufactured products and components, measured in terms of cost, to be made in the U.S. For the solar sector, it also defines the eligible categories of manufactured products as the inverters and tracking systems used in utility-scale solar projects and, importantly, solar modules, or the completed panels that are deployed in the field. 

But significant parts of a final assembled solar module — including the silicon wafers used to manufacture the solar cells that make up roughly 30 percent of the cost of completed modules — could theoretically come from overseas.

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

Jay Turner is having a hard time keeping up with the flood of investment in the U.S. electric-vehicle supply chain that was unlocked by last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Every week it seems there’s a new announcement, and that means he has to update his tally of the tens of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs flowing into the space. 

The latest update in late May from Turner, a professor of environmental studies at Wellesley College and author of Charged, a book on the history of batteries, tallied 48 new projects representing a combined $50.3 billion in investment. That’s at least $3.8 billion more than he and his students had tallied just 30 days before.

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

KINGS MOUNTAIN, North Carolina — The blue-green waters ringed by chalky white cliffs could have been North Carolina’s answer to the Neapolitan coast. I squinted through the pines at the shimmering lake far below and imagined diving into the cool azure.

But there would be no swimming today. A rusty barbed-wire fence ringed the basin, with signs reading ​“Danger: Open Pit.” The kudzu-carpeted hill I had just climbed was made of rubble that had been scooped out of the lake before it was a lake, back when the Kings Mountain mine and other nearby operations produced more hard-rock lithium than pretty much anywhere else in the world. Then the mines shut down and the mining jobs shipped overseas, like so many other industries at the close of the 20^th century.

The pendulum is swinging back now. The Biden administration is betting big that renewing the American industrial machine will speed progress toward decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid by 2035, a crucial step toward addressing climate change. The White House also wants to use that clean electricity to power mass transition to electric vehicles, thereby tackling greenhouse gases from transportation. 

Spurred by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, a whole new Battery Belt is emerging in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio, down through Kentucky, and out across Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas. It makes sense that those northern states, the historic hub of the American auto industry, would attract billions of dollars for the next wave of auto manufacturing. The region began dipping its toes into battery and EV production over a decade ago, when then-Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm picked it as a strategic growth industry to help her state bounce back from the Great Recession.

The real surprise is the Southeastern stretch of the belt, a quickly growing cluster of factories spanning everything from lithium processing to battery fabrication to auto assembly to battery recycling.

I’ve covered the battery storage beat since the neolithic days of 2016, when hardly anyone bought electric cars and batteries played a vanishingly small role in the power grid. Until recently, I’d had occasion to write about the Southeast, my onetime home, only a handful of times. The states in this region had never pushed the boundaries of climate policy or clean energy deployment. Then, in the past year, they’ve been busting out one billion-dollar battery or EV factory after another. Georgia — not Michigan — leads the country in post-IRA clean energy factory investments, with over $17 billion, according to a Canary Media analysis. South Carolina comes in second with $9.3 billion, and only then Michigan, with $8.1 billion. 

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

Canary’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format.

The Biden administration is on a mission to bring manufacturing back to the United States — and clean energy is at the core of it. 

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed last August, directly incentivizes the onshoring of supply chains and manufacturing for clean energy technologies. And just nine months after the law passed, it seems to be achieving that goal: Nearly 100 new solar, wind, battery and EV facilities have been announced in that span of time. 

But even with this surge of new activity, the United States still has a long way to go when it comes to global clean energy manufacturing, which remains heavily concentrated in China.

As of 2023, nearly 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and batteries are made in China, as well as more than 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines, according to the International Energy Agency. And while the country’s leadership is to thank for much of the remarkable reduction in the price of clean energy technologies over the past decade, U.S. politicians have grown increasingly uncomfortable with it as tensions with China have mounted and clean energy has become more and more crucial to national security.

Looking ahead, the massive new investments in U.S. cleantech manufacturing will move the needle a bit on this country’s share of global solar production and help it tread water with wind manufacturing. Batteries, on the other hand, are where the U.S. is making a bigger dent. The U.S. manufacturing announcements made since the IRA passed account for nearly half of the global pipeline for battery manufacturing through 2030. That will make the U.S. home to 15 percent of global battery production, more than double what it is today. 

And the U.S. is not alone in its industrial pursuit. As demand for clean energy soars globally, a growing number of countries are also looking to capitalize on the investment and jobs that can come from producing clean energy components at home. The European Union, Canada, India, Japan and China are among others merging energy security, climate goals and industrial policy to incentivize clean energy manufacturing and deployment. 

But despite the widespread efforts to ramp up clean energy manufacturing, China’s share of the solar and wind supply chains is not expected to drop through 2030. As for batteries, IEA projects a slight reduction over that time, but the country is still expected to control more than two-thirds of global supply. After all, it’s not like China suddenly has stopped building: It accounts for most of the planned manufacturing capacity expansion plans through 2030 for solar PV and onshore wind.

So even though manufacturing capacity is indeed expanding geographically, powered in part by the U.S. clean energy manufacturing boom, China’s leading spot in clean energy manufacturing is unlikely to be challenged in this decade.

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

How do you grind up an old lithium-ion battery without starting a fire?

It’s not so easy, but startup Ascend Elements figured out a way to do it at its newly opened recycling plant in Covington, Georgia. This facility takes scrap from nearby manufacturers in the Southeastern Battery Belt, as well as old electric vehicle batteries, and carefully shreds them in specialized machinery. This produces a fine powder called black mass, which contains the materials needed to make a new battery’s cathodes and anodes. 

Ascend currently sells this black mass to battery manufacturers, but the startup will soon refine the materials itself at a $1 billion factory in southern Kentucky.

Ascend’s process tackles the issue of battery waste while generating new materials, cutting down on the need for new mining. Here’s what it looks like.

Headquartered in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho with clients on every continent, KORE Power provides functional solutions to meet the growing demand for green economic expansion and a decarbonized future. As a fully integrated provider of battery cells and clean energy technology and solutions, KORE drives the energy transition through direct access to superior tech, clean energy manufacturing, and unmatched support for clean energy jobs and resilient, sustainable communities worldwide. KORE Power’s robust portfolio provides the commercial, industrial, utility and defense markets with next-generation battery cells, advanced energy storage systems that scale to grid+, intuitive asset management, and EV power and charging infrastructure support.

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of clean energy manufacturing week.

Today, China controls most of the global lithium supply chain, but it wasn’t always like that. 

The North Carolina town of Kings Mountain is home to what was one of the world’s biggest hard-rock lithium mines back in the Cold War years. But the operation shut down in 1988, and drop by drop, the open pit it left behind filled with rainwater.

Now the Southeastern states are building a Battery Belt full of lithium-ion battery factories and electric-vehicle assembly plants. The long-dormant North Carolina lithium mines are strategically placed to supply that booming manufacturing base with domestically sourced materials if the mining companies can secure the necessary permits. This could make the clean-energy supply chain more secure and lower carbon emissions from the extraction and processing of lithium.

Canary Media visited the abandoned mine to get a closer look at the once-great facility and examine the role it could play in the region’s clean-energy supply chain. Check it out below.

Headquartered in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho with clients on every continent, KORE Power provides functional solutions to meet the growing demand for green economic expansion and a decarbonized future. As a fully integrated provider of battery cells and clean energy technology and solutions, KORE drives the energy transition through direct access to superior tech, clean energy manufacturing, and unmatched support for clean energy jobs and resilient, sustainable communities worldwide. KORE Power’s robust portfolio provides the commercial, industrial, utility and defense markets with next-generation battery cells, advanced energy storage systems that scale to grid+, intuitive asset management, and EV power and charging infrastructure support.

Canary Media thanks KORE Power for its support of our special series on clean energy manufacturing.

Robert Howey has worked at the Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing plant in Dalton, Georgia since it opened in 2019. But like many of the factory’s other employees, he used to work in a completely different industry: carpet manufacturing. The Qcells plant is located in what Georgians affectionately call ​“the carpet capital of the world.”

For two years, Howey was a creeler, knotting together rolls of yarn, so that as one roll finished getting fed into the weaving machine, the next could seamlessly follow. 

Before Howey started at Qcells, ​“I had no idea about solar,” he said. He was hired to be a ​“tabber operator” on the production line, where his role would be to watch over machines that solder silicon wafers together, an early stage in the making of a solar module. But he didn’t understand how his particular task fit into the overall process, which made him uncertain about how to do his job well. ​“I was really nervous about it,” he told Canary Media.

Georgia Quick Start, a state-funded workforce training program, gave him the guidance he needed. In a week of on-ramping, trainers walked him through all the steps of making a solar panel, instruction that gave him the confidence to start his new career. Quick Start, he said, was ​“a lifesaver.”

What is Georgia Quick Start?

Clean energy manufacturing in the U.S. is poised for explosive growth; the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will infuse more than $47 billion in the buildout of clean energy technologies and spur an estimated 900,000 manufacturing jobs over the next decade. But for that ramp-up to be successful, hundreds of thousands of workers like Howey will need training and reskilling. 

Georgia Quick Start, which provides customized job training for companies free of charge, has a track record of tackling that challenge — and could serve as a model for other states preparing their workers for jobs in clean energy manufacturing. 

Quick Start was founded in 1967 with the goal of attracting manufacturers from northern Rust Belt states to Georgia in order to diversify the state’s agriculture-based economy, according to Rodger Brown, executive director of Quick Start. The program was designed to prepare a workforce accustomed to seasonally dependent, sunup-to-sundown farm labor to industry’s regimented 8-hour workdays. 

Over the following decades, Quick Start steadily grew to serve a broad range of industries. By the 1980s, for example, the program was training workers for automobile manufacturer Ford Motor Company and aircraft companies Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin), Boeing and Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation. In the 1990s, it scaled up to serve the booming carpeting industry around Dalton, Georgia.

Today, Quick Start continues to train workers for jobs in these industries as well as for ones in the manufacturing of food, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, vinyl flooring — and, increasingly, clean energy technologies such as EVs, solar panels and batteries. 

A division of the state’s technical college system, Quick Start has achieved national recognition for its effectiveness. A panel of experts surveyed by Area Development Magazine has named it the top state workforce development program in the country for nine years running.

Since its founding, the program has helped prepare more than 1.8 million Georgians for new jobs, according to Brown. Now, it’s applying much of that accumulated know-how to training workers entering the clean energy manufacturing workforce. Clean energy companies and their suppliers currently make up the majority of Quick Start’s clients, Brown said. And he expects that trend to continue, with companies bringing billions of dollars to the state and growing fast: 

• Rivian is investing $5 billion in an EV plant in east Georgia with plans to hire 7,500 workers. 
• Hyundai Motor Group is investing $5.5 billion in an EV and battery plant and has plans to hire 8,100 employees.
• SK Battery America, which since 2019 has invested $2.6 billion in two Georgia manufacturing plants to provide lithium-ion batteries for EVs, including the Ford F-150 Lightning, has so far created 2,600 jobs and aims to add 400 more. 
• Qcells, the top supplier of U.S. solar panels, announced in January that it’s investing $2.5 billion to expand its operations and build its own solar panel supply chain — from ingots to modules — in Dalton and Cartersville, Georgia, creating 2,500 new jobs.

Cleantech companies are setting up shop in Georgia for many reasons — generous tax incentives and the fact that Georgia is a ​“right-to-work” state with legislation that weakens labor unions are certainly among them. But Quick Start is also a big part of the equation.

The program was a major factor for Qcells, said Lisa Nash, the company’s senior director of human resources. Quick Start developed training materials for the South Korean manufacturer’s first U.S. plant in Dalton, the one Howey was hired to work in, which meant ​“we didn’t have to invest the thousands of hours of making classroom and video training that was necessary to get this factory started,” Nash said. That was ​“a game-changer for us.”

Steven Jahng, director of external affairs of South Korea–based SK Battery America, echoed those sentiments in Site Selection​’s 2023 Workforce Guide: ​“The key incentive for SK Battery is the Georgia Quick Start program. They know exactly how to train the average person off the street.” 

Retaining new workers

Like most advanced manufacturing facilities, factories that produce clean energy technologies are filled with powerful, highly automated machines and robots. Even a single wrong move, such as tripping a sensor that starts a machine whirring when it should stay off, could be dangerous. 

In its weeklong Qcells training course and subsequent follow-up sessions, Quick Start teaches new hires how to stay safe, including requirements from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That’s hugely important, said David Uribe, who started working as a Qcells equipment technician in February. 

New employees could be straight out of high school or coming from service roles at McDonald’s or Walmart, said Uribe, who has been a mechanic for decades. ​“It’s a big difference working with machines that could potentially kill you.”

The U.S. energy transition is moving faster than ever — and it’s increasingly a Made-in-America affair. 

Canary Media just published a series of in-depth articles digging into all aspects of the country’s clean energy manufacturing push, which was set into motion when President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last August. You can read all of our reporting on the U.S. clean energy manufacturing boom here.

But for the TL;DR version of our coverage, here are six of the most important things to know about clean energy manufacturing in the U.S.

Clean energy manufacturing is no longer niche — it’s at the fore of the U.S. economy

For most of its existence, U.S. clean energy manufacturing has been marginal, as the country has historically leaned on imports to build out its clean energy capacity. 

But that’s changed dramatically in the nine months since the Inflation Reduction Act went into effect. Motivated by the harsh lessons of Covid-era supply-chain disruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as a rising desire to reduce reliance on China, Democrats passed the law last August and unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars to encourage the creation of a domestic clean energy supply chain. 

Since then, private firms have announced nearly 100 clean energy manufacturing facilities across the U.S.

The Biden administration is now hoping the U.S. will ride this wave of activity into a leadership position for global clean energy manufacturing. Not only does the White House want to see ​“as much of this manufacturing in the United States as possible,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told Canary Media, but it will even push for exporting clean energy around the world.

For more, read Julian Spector’s in-depth look at the current state of U.S. clean energy manufacturing.

Clean energy manufacturing is surging in the U.S., but the country is far from self-sufficient

Depending on whom you ask, the Inflation Reduction Act is either a climate law or an energy security law — or some mix of both. 

In fact, Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) told our reporter Julian Spector that energy security is the reason he wound up giving the law his crucial ​“yes” vote. 

But as of now, it’s unclear exactly when the U.S. will be able to produce the clean energy products it needs. Most of the factories announced since the Inflation Reduction Act passed aim to go online by the end of 2024, but those factories are not enough on their own to meet the country’s surging demand for solar panels, wind turbines, EVs and batteries.

Let’s take solar as a case in point: Even in the best-case scenario, in which manufacturers hit 100 percent of the production timelines and targets they’ve announced, the Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that the U.S. will still need to import 24 gigawatts of solar panels in 2030 alone. The country installed 17 gigawatts last year, for reference. 

That means the U.S. will still have to rely on imports to reach its climate goals — even as it attempts to incubate a bustling, homegrown clean-manufacturing industry. 

For more, read Eric Wesoff’s analysis of the country’s bid for solar self-sufficiency and check out our data-driven piece about the speed and scale of U.S. clean energy manufacturing.

The Inflation Reduction Act is reversing the yearslong slowdown in U.S. wind manufacturing

The U.S. wind energy manufacturing industry has in recent years vacillated between operating at gale force and screeching to a standstill. That’s because the federal government has occasionally allowed a key tax credit to lapse, hampering the industry’s ability to make a predictable return on its investments. 

But now that the Inflation Reduction Act has firmed up the formerly fickle tax credits, multiple companies are reopening, expanding and even building brand-new wind manufacturing facilities across the U.S.

All of that has contributed to a ​“second renaissance” for wind manufacturing in the U.S., John Hensley, the vice president of research and analytics at the American Clean Power Association trade group, told Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci. 

Read the full story on the revival of U.S. wind manufacturing here.

The Southeastern United States is emerging as a key hub for clean energy manufacturing

If you look at a map of the clean energy facilities announced since the Inflation Reduction Act (Canary Media has conveniently created one), you’ll quickly notice a cluster of activity concentrated in the lower right-hand corner of the country.

That’s because states in the Southeast — namely, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee — have attracted the majority of clean energy manufacturing announcements so far. In fact, Georgia and South Carolina are the two leading states in terms of cleantech manufacturing investment since the IRA went into effect. 

In particular, the region has become a burgeoning ​“Battery Belt” as facilities spanning from lithium processing to battery fabrication to auto assembly to battery recycling have opened up, broken ground or been announced. 

And while the Southeast’s surging influence in clean energy manufacturing may feel sudden, it’s actually been decades in the making, according to Julian Spector, who spent three days traveling across the region last month.

Read the full dispatch from the Southeastern Battery Belt, a critically important region in the U.S. bid to become a clean energy manufacturing powerhouse.

Tax credits, while byzantine, are the catalyst behind this manufacturing push

Terms like ​“remarkable” and ​“revolutionary” aren’t typically what come to mind when you think of taxes. And yet the dynamic new U.S. clean energy manufacturing sector is largely the result of innovative changes to the federal tax code. 

The Inflation Reduction Act is stuffed with billions of dollars in tax credits for both clean energy manufacturers and consumers, most of which are available only for products that are at least partially made in the U.S. That’s created a straightforward incentive for companies: Produce clean energy products in the U.S. and the government will give you money. 

Companies have responded to the signal. Private firms, both domestic and foreign, have announced over $70 billion in investment in clean energy facilities over the last nine months. 

But behind this simple cause-and-effect are thorny debates over exactly who and what is eligible for these tax credits — and whether they’re enough to achieve domestic manufacturing ambitions. 

Read Jeff St. John’s deeply reported pieces on the debate over one of the climate law’s key tax credits and whether EV tax credits can create a manufacturing base on par with U.S. demand.

None of this is going to succeed if the U.S. doesn’t quickly train a qualified workforce

Clean energy manufacturing is expected to create 900,000 jobs in the U.S. over the next 10 years. 

Finding enough workers to fill those roles is the No. 1 challenge facing the U.S. clean energy manufacturing sector, execs told our reporter Julian Spector. The view is the same from the Department of Energy: ​“The big challenge is going to be workforce,” Secretary Granholm told Canary Media.

This is, in some ways, a good problem for the country to have. But it’s still a problem. 

A state-run program in Georgia, the country’s burgeoning cleantech manufacturing capital, may represent one solution. 

The state’s decades-old Quick Start program provides free, customized job training for companies — and as the state has morphed into a cleantech hub, the program’s clients have begun to skew heavily toward clean energy manufacturing firms, Quick Start’s executive director told our staff writer Alison F. Takemura. 

Read the full story on how Georgia is helping train clean-energy manufacturing workers.