The Scoop
Despite its efforts to the contrary, the Trump administration is overseeing “a golden age of solar,” according to Tim Pawlenty, the Republican former governor of Minnesota and presidential primary contender who is now the top US solar industry lobbyist.
In his first interview since taking over as president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association last week, he told Semafor the White House “has underappreciated solar’s role in how we’re going to solve these problems” of energy reliability and affordability at a time of booming power demand. Yet despite the rollback of renewable energy tax credits and a federal government that routinely casts doubt on its efficacy, solar combined with batteries remains by far the fastest-growing energy source in the US, accounting for 91% of new power added to the grid in the first quarter of the year.
Pawlenty said his priorities included pushing for a permitting reform bill to pass Congress this year and for sustained tax credit support for solar panel manufacturing in the US. He also needs to unite a fractious coalition that ranges from traditional environmentalists to MAGA influencers, and which is divided over issues including tax credits and trade relations with China. Pawlenty, as governor, was an early Republican advocate for climate policy, but walked that back during his 2011 presidential run, at the time calling his support for cap-and-trade “a mistake” and saying that the scientific consensus on climate change was “in dispute.” Now, he said that climate change was “a concern,” but that “you don’t have to be Republican or Democrat to believe in clean energy.”
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Tim’s view
Big Solar is facing an existential test in the US. Starting July 4, tax credits for the operation of new large-scale solar systems will begin to wind down until the credits disappear entirely by the end of next year. Yet the industry has never been more bullish. Solar has been the fastest-growing power source for several years running, and is projected to keep up that pace for the foreseeable future, tax credits or no. Those federal incentives helped to level the playing field against gas and other power sources, industry leaders say. But even without them, solar is still cheaper and faster to build than any alternative, and when coupled with ever-cheaper batteries is increasingly unencumbered by clouds and nighttime. The lesson is that economics trump political noise, which the industry has gotten good at tuning out.
Still, there are challenges ahead, especially relating to the bureaucratic obstacles of building large energy projects and hooking them up to the grid. Last year’s big battle was over tax credits on Capitol Hill. Now the fight has largely moved to state legislatures and city council meetings, said Jon Powers, co-founder of the renewables investment firm CleanCapital and a SEIA board member. That’s a space where Pawlenty, a moderate Republican from a blue state, could be especially helpful, Powers said. And while some industry insiders were frustrated by the inability of SEIA and its former leader, Abigail Ross Hopper, a Democrat, to defeat the tax credit cuts, mounting nationwide anxiety over power prices have created an opening for a new political coalition behind solar that includes such high-powered Trump-world figures as Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy director of policy Stephen Miller.
“Historically we’ve been an industry on the defense,” Powers said. “For a long time, we were relying on just being ‘the right thing to do.’ Now there’s a much stronger argument around affordability, and a chance for us to bring forward a new playbook.”
A key element of that playbook, in Pawlenty’s view, is to put some distance between the industry and its climate-action roots. “Regardless of whether you’re a climate activist or somewhere else on the political continuum regarding climate, we don’t have to get into the details of that too much because we can just say it’s clean,” he said. “Who’s against clean?”
First, Pawlenty has to unite the companies in his industry, some of whom are still squabbling about whether to push to bring back solar installation tax credits. Pawlenty demurred on the tax credit question, saying only that “SEIA is going to consider anything that encourages the promotion and deployment of solar energy.” And he needs to educate his fellow Republicans in Congress and in the administration, many of whom have an “outdated understanding” of the extent to which battery technology has solved solar’s inherent reliability problem, he said. Solar, he said, “is a huge and important story that I think will be increasingly attractive to the administration once they get a fuller appreciation of it.”
Room for Disagreement
Solar may still be beating out other new power sources, but the rollback of tax credits will cause less solar to get built than it otherwise would have, according to Wood Mackenzie, with the forecast for large-scale projects down at least 4% from pre-bill levels and the residential market cut by almost 50%. And an even bigger concern, Powers said, is the administration’s capricious approach to project permitting. The recent string of federal lease refunds for offshore wind are a deterrent to investing in renewables in the US, he said. “They’re using taxpayer money to make the affordability crisis worse,” he said.
Notable
- Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Monday pledged $285 million to support renewable energy lobbying groups in developing countries. These groups are often severely outmatched by their competitors from the oil and gas sector, he said during London Climate Action Week.