By Benjamin Storrow, Politico, March 17, 2025
onald Trump and Joe Biden share one thing in common: a love of manufacturing.
But the similarities end there. The former president lavished subsidies on manufacturers that churn out clean energy components like solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicle batteries. The current president favors tariffs on imported goods to help American factories and has pledged to slash the Biden-era subsidies.
The resulting uncertainty for clean energy manufacturers is already starting to bite.
Canceled manufacturing projects through the first 2 1/2 months of 2025 totaled roughly $8 billion, far exceeding the $1.6 billion terminated during all of last year, according to Atlas Public Policy. The canceled projects include a transmission cable factory in Massachusetts, a battery plant in Arizona and an EV component factory in Georgia.
“It’s really very risky right now,” Alex Zhu, the CEO of the solar cell maker ES Foundry, told me for a story today about the state of clean tech manufacturing. And he’s one of the lucky ones: ES Foundry recently opened a cell factory in South Carolina, the second of its kind in the U.S.
Trump isn’t the only reason for the new skittishness. Manufacturing is a tough business, and China dominates clean technology. A slowdown in the Chinese economy means the country has surplus capacity to ship solar panels, batteries and EVs around the world.
That’s good news if you’re in the market to, say, build a utility-scale solar development because panels are dirt cheap. But it’s bad news for anyone outside China trying to make a living fabricating solar panels because, again, they’re dirt cheap.
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