Amidst the shifting political landscape, advanced energy experts weigh in on the potential impacts of Trump's proposed tariffs on renewable energy solutions (e.g., offshore wind, solar, and geothermal). United's Harry Godfrey shared his insights with The Boston Globe, emphasizing the progress advanced energy has made across the nation and the many benefits renewables provide for Americans, including lower energy costs, job creation, and economic boosts.
Yet here is where the future of energy in Massachusetts is poised to take its next big step, as SouthCoast Wind’s offshore wind project gears up to make landfall on nearby shores, and the Prysmian manufacturing company prepares to launch a new facility for the undersea power cables that will pipe in electricity from the new wind farm off the state’s southern coast.
That is, unless President-elect Donald Trump follows through on his threats to curb renewable energy and impose new tariffs that could sharply drive up costs for the imported components needed for the project. If implemented, high taxes, coupled with other economic policies, could threaten the enterprise — and with it, hundreds of new jobs critical to Massachusetts’ efforts to meet its climate goals.
The green energy industry has been through this before, with tariffs by Trump in his first administration, as well as by Presidents Obama and Biden, on solar panels from China. If the goal of tariffs is to boost domestic production and punish exporting nations, those earlier levies failed, as Chinese companies simply shifted production to nontariff countries in Southeast Asia. Now the United States imports its solar panels mainly from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
A study by Cornell, Yale, NYU, and Duke economists found the tariffs did not end up increasing manufacturing in the United States much, but they did have a significant — and negative — effect on the installation sector, which accounts for nearly 30 percent of Massachusetts’ clean energy jobs.
Tariffs on solar panels under Biden led to “a small increase in labor in manufacturing, but you had a huge decrease in labor in installation,” said Robert Stavins, a energy and economic development professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Trump has threatened to pull the plug on offshore wind and directly restrict support for renewable energy production. Last month, he also pledged to slap a 25 percent tariff on Mexican and Canadian imports and an additional 10 percent import tax on Chinese goods. If implemented, imported goods in every sector could go up, including the equipment that powers the state’s transition off fossil fuels, from solar panels to batteries to transmission cables.
In the geothermal heating and cooling industry, meanwhile, industry professionals see themselves as fairly insulated from tariffs.
“The heart of geothermal is in Oklahoma, the major factories that produce the geothermal heat pumps are in” Indiana, Florida, and South Dakota, said Zeyneb Magavi, chief executive of HEET, a Massachusetts clean energy nonprofit that focuses on geothermal. “At the moment, I have not found something that gets in the way of geothermal being unusually resilient to a political environment.”
A Department of Public Utilities analysis from 2022 projects that about one-quarter of the state’s building sector will use geothermal networks for heating and cooling by 2050.
Yet, even with manufacturing hubs in red states, US factories continue to rely on imports of raw materials, which could rise in cost with across-the-board tariffs.
The geothermal industry does, however, have an ace up its sleeve to play with the Trump administration: In Massachusetts, the nascent industry is working with natural gas companies — which Trump has vowed to protect — to build the underground infrastructure that powers geothermal heat pumps.
Geothermal heating and cooling could even be a potential local job booster for manufacturing, Magavi noted, since “we do make our own drills and we do make our own geothermal heat pumps, and it is an industry that is small enough and needs to grow [enough] that building more local manufacturing would be great.”
Many who work in clean energy share a cautious sense of optimism.
Because the clean energy transition is well underway, no executive order will be able to stop the free market in its tracks, said Harry Godfrey, a managing director at the clean energy trade association Advanced Energy United.
“But none of these technologies, none of these industries, are Trump-proof,” he added. “Let’s be clear about that.”
Read the full article here.