How is clean energy manufacturing playing out in swing states? (ft. Form Energy)

When I was growing up, during the Clinton and Bush presidencies, American manufacturing was on the wane.

The bipartisan Washington consensus accepted the steady outflow of American jobs to other countries in the name of abstract economic theories. If your town lost its anchor factory and fell apart, well, that was too bad, but at least the unemployed workers could buy marginally cheaper consumer goods.

My father resisted this thinking, and when buying something, tried to track down a version that was still made in the U.S., whether it be a baking pan, umbrella, or some other implement. The quest seemed to grow harder as time went on — a perhaps quixotic response to a world moving in one direction.

Now the world’s turning back the other way, at least for strategic technologies. The party of Reagan has become the party of tariffs, and Democrats have embraced industrial policy after a multi-decade hiatus. The infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act, both of which had bipartisan support, provided money and policy to kick off the onshoring, while the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed with only Democratic votes, accelerated the trend for the clean energy industry, which happened to be surging through record growth at the exact moment American politicians were looking to revive domestic manufacturing.

How are these new political and economic tailwinds reshaping towns and cities across America? This is an especially salient question in swing states, where voters will exercise outsized influence on whether these Biden-era policies continue. So I hit the road this summer to look for answers.

I spent a week in bucolic Dalton, Georgia, the historic carpet-making town represented in the U.S. House by Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene, which now hosts the single largest solar-panel factory in the country. I drove around Greater Detroit in search of the electrified future of auto manufacturing, and learned about new factories making energy-efficient windows and industrial heat pumps. In Pennsylvania, I saw abandoned steel factories revived to make advanced batteries or steel for solar plants.

Here’s what I learned along the way.

Yes, the clean energy manufacturing boom is underway

Over the past several decades, the cleantech industry in the U.S. has been running on imports. The few companies that managed to make solar panels or batteries here were the exceptions that proved the rule. When those holdouts periodically asked for more trade protections, the bulk of the industry shouted them down, to maintain access to cheaper equipment.

The Inflation Reduction Act changed that.

Enough new solar panel factories have opened to nearly meet our national appetite for this product (if they all operate at full capacity, which isn’t guaranteed). That’s a speedy reversal of fortune for the U.S. solar industry, but panel assembly is also the easiest step in the solar supply chain to spin up. Now, a select few companies are pushing further, to make the higher-value silicon wafers and cells that go into the panels. The battery factory buildout is taking more time and money, but major operations have opened and many more are on their way in the Rust Belt and the Southeast.

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