What’s being missed in the tariff discussion is that the United States screwed up. When I worked at the Solar Energy Research Institute from 1978 to 1981, we thought that President Jimmy Carter’s approach on renewables would boost the United States into a world powered by solar, wind, and other renewables within 30 or so years by improving the technology and lowering the unit costs.
But then came Ronald Reagan who slashed the renewables budget, and Congress, which allowed renewables tax credits to expire in 1986. It wasn’t until nearly a quarter century later that President Obama’s fiscal year 2010 budget put up as much renewables funding—inflation-adjusted—as Carter’s FY1981 budget had done.
Instead of developing an industrial policy to speed renewables development with ample research and development and commercialization money and a heavy government investment in an innovative renewable infrastructure, only production tax credits and investment tax credits helped solar and wind grow, starting in the early ‘90s.
Mostly what we heard until just a few years ago was that solar and wind were boutique sources that would NEVER amount to anything more than niche power.
What did the Chinese do? They invested tens of billions to turn their solar manufacturing into a strategic industry.
A tariff isn’t going give the U.S. a strategic industry in solar. Rather, it will slow down development from what it could have been by persuading some percentage of residential and commercial customers as well as investors to back off.
The failure to take Carter’s renewables initiatives in the late ‘70s and transform them into an industrial policy cost the United States its lead in solar and wind. It’s why Vestas, a Danish company, is the No. 1 wind manufacturer in the world.
We'll be lucky if the solar tariff doubles the number of solar cell and panel manufacturing jobs in the U.S. from their current level of about 2,000. And even if this doubling happens, that will have to be balanced against the 20,000 or so other solar jobs, many of them manufacturing jobs, that will be lost.
One does not have to be a globalist puppet to see how counterproductive this will be.