Election Day yielded few bright spots for the transition to clean energy, but there was one in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The city of nearly 120,000 voted 79 percent in favor of a measure to create a ​“sustainable energy utility” (SEU) that will supplement the existing grid and help residents shift to cleaner, more reliable energy.

With that overwhelming approval, city officials will now figure out the governance, staffing, and leadership of the new local utility. They have already begun outreach to residents interested in participating; 600 customers had registered by Tuesday afternoon. The plan is to assemble an initial tranche of 20 megawatts worth of demand, at which point Ann Arbor will finance the purchase and installation of solar panels, batteries, and energy-efficiency upgrades to serve those customers.

Installations — on homes, sheds, schools, libraries — could happen in the next 18 to 24 months, Mayor Christopher Taylor told Canary Media. Longer term, the utility hopes to construct a district-level geothermal network to heat and cool buildings without fossil fuels.

“I’m incredibly gratified by the support that voters of Ann Arbor have given to the SEU,” Taylor said. ​“The SEU is going to be both great for our carbon future and great for the pocketbook.”

The effort to fast-track local clean energy installations serves Ann Arbor’s ambitious climate goals. But it’s also a response to an uptick in power outages as extreme weather collides with for-profit utility DTE’s aging distribution-grid infrastructure. Monopoly utilities, for the most part, have shown little interest in seizing the opportunities of decentralized energy, but that’s core to the new Ann Arbor utility’s mission.

The measure’s success marks the latest episode in a sporadic national trend of communities trying to break free from the century-old model of for-profit, monopoly utilities controlling local energy systems.

Such efforts typically provoke a scorched-earth response from the incumbent utility. Utilities elsewhere have waged lengthy legal battles and spent millions of dollars on political campaigns to stop these escape attempts. When localities win their energy autonomy, they often have to pay hefty exit fees as a reimbursement for grid infrastructure built on their behalf. Communities that make it through that ringer then have to shoulder the laborious task of operating and maintaining decades-old infrastructure while trying to push ahead with new technologies.

In a bracing and punchily worded 2021 report, Ann Arbor’s sustainability office made clear that it would take a different route.

“Every dollar we don’t spend in litigation or to buy the [investor owned utility]’s old, failing infrastructure is money we can spend on new infrastructure here in Ann Arbor to generate power, distribute power, and store power — dollars we can use to immediately provide reliable, clean, and affordable public power to everyone,” the city wrote.

In short, it’s a distributed energy wish list coming to life. Ann Arbor has created a clear pathway to building more clean, local, resilient, and publicly owned infrastructure. If the city can make electricity cheaper on top of that, it will demonstrate that a better electricity system is possible even without completely overhauling the existing utility industry.

Local action for local needs

In 2019, Ann Arbor set a 2030 deadline to deliver equitable, community-wide carbon neutrality. Meeting that target requires sourcing clean electricity, driving out fossil-fuel combustion in buildings, and cleaning up transportation.

But the city’s built environment poses some challenges. Ann Arbor spans about 49,000 households, 52 percent of which are rentals. Overall housing stock averages 48 years old. That necessitates a lot of retrofits to turn these buildings into efficient systems running on clean electricity.

The SEU thus prioritizes energy-efficiency upgrades for customers. Unlike a for-profit utility, the municipally owned nonprofit has no incentive to let customers keep wasting energy. Ann Arbor aims to make efficiency more accessible with tools like on-bill financing, ​“structured to match or be lower than the monthly utility bill savings, resulting in a positive cash-flow for the customer immediately,” per the 2021 report.

The utility can buy equipment like solar panels and batteries in bulk and finance these upgrades with its AAA municipal credit rating, accessing far cheaper capital than a bunch of lone homeowners negotiating separately with private lenders. And the on-bill charge stays with the house — if someone moves out, the new resident takes over paying for the improvements that will lower their bill.

Climate goals weren’t the only factor motivating the change. The area’s aging grid has suffered a number of outages lately.

“Ann Arbor is currently served by an investor-owned utility that has a history of reliability challenges in our area,” Taylor noted. ​“We expect the SEU to provide far more reliable service.”

The SEU plans to install and own solar panels on customers’ rooftops and batteries in their sheds and garages, selling those customers the power at cost, without a markup. That lets residents access solar power and backup power without dropping a load of cash up front for it or taking on debt. This kind of subscription is available from companies like Sunrun, but they do it to make money, not to sell at cost.

The most radical dimension of the plan is to use the city’s utility franchise rights to build wires between properties, so that they can share excess solar power locally. Most everywhere in the country, customer-led upgrades have to stay on the customer side of the utility meter; crossing that boundary to sell power to a neighbor violates the utility’s legally enforced monopoly. This stands in the way of visions for interconnected neighborhoods generating and selling power with each other based on who needs it at a given moment.

But Ann Arbor officials tracked down a century-old precedent that makes sharing power possible: ​“The Michigan Constitution preserves the rights of cities and villages to form their own utility or to supplement an existing utility,” Missy Stults, the city’s sustainability and innovation director, told me.

Thus, the SEU will link up different properties if the people living there want it. If a home generates more solar than it can use, it could run a line to a neighboring house that’s shaded by trees, allowing it to buy surplus power.

“We’ll be able to connect homes with each other, schools with homes, schools with each other,” Taylor said. ​“We’re going to do this in a way that is cost-effective and fully opt-in.”

This plan assumes people will be happy to offer up their roof space for panels that the SEU will own and use for broader community benefit. But doing so will let that household buy cheaper, cleaner power for itself. The battery controls present some additional complications: Will the host customer get first dibs on backup power, or will that be split among the locally connected homes as well? This is new territory for distributed energy in the U.S.

That said, the strong show of support at the ballot box demonstrates the local community is fully on board with the general direction of the SEU. It’s no accident that this idea is coming to fruition in a college town like Ann Arbor, said Liesl Clark, a former state climate leader who now serves as director of climate action engagement at the University of Michigan.

“There are a lot of people who are innovative and also are interested in having agency,” she said. ​“It is a community that was ripe for a solution like this.”

Furthermore, the city structured the plan in a way to minimize any downside for residents who don’t want to jump on the decentralized power opportunity.

“You haven’t asked me how much it’s going to cost the taxpayer,” Taylor told me as I was about to wrap up our phone call. He answered the rhetorical question: ​“Nothing!”

That pledge veers into too-good-to-be-true territory, but the SEU structure makes it possible. The city won’t levy any new taxes because it’s not buying out DTE’s assets. Instead, it’s installing new equipment based on voluntary customer commitments, and those customers pay their way, while saving themselves money.

Breaking free from utilities without all the hassle

The outcome of this effort remains far from certain. But so far, Ann Arbor has managed to pursue a low-drama, low-conflict way to break up with a monopoly utility, in contrast to high-profile recent attempts elsewhere.

The city of Boulder, Colorado, famously fought for a decade to peel off from Xcel Energy, and ultimately gave up. In 2010, California mega-utility PG&E spent $46 million to make it harder for communities to source their own electricity, though even that gargantuan sum failed to stop the rise of community choice aggregators.

Maine has grappled for years with its deeply unpopular monopoly utilities. Last year, voters nonetheless soundly rejected a ballot referendum to seize utility assets under a new public power entity. The utilities spent $40 million to fight it, and independent experts raised concerns about how the public entity would deliver on promises of a cheaper, more efficient grid after saddling itself with billions of dollars of debt.

Activists in Ann Arbor have also pushed for full municipalization — a city-level version of what Maine considered and rejected. The city is working on a second study to dig into the details of what purchasing the grid infrastructure would entail. That conversation will continue as the SEU implementation moves forward, Taylor noted.

For its part, Michigan utility DTE hasn’t declared war on Ann Arbor. Following the vote, the company stated that it will continue to invest in making the city’s grid more resilient and clean — a recent Michigan climate law requires ramping to 60 percent renewable power by 2035 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2040.

The public interest in full municipalization may explain the muted response from the utility: The SEU allows DTE to go on with business as usual, and its distribution grid will continue to play a crucial role even if kilowatt-hour sales decline from the new local solar generation.

Instead of fighting the utility colossus head on, Ann Arbor is taking a live-and-let-live approach. It’s a case where avoiding head-on conflict could make it possible to deliver the benefits of clean, local energy far more quickly.

Voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, create a local clean energy utility is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The presidential election may well decide the future of the United States’ ambitious new clean energy agenda, but a handful of smaller, less-discussed races will have a more immediate and direct impact on the energy transition in several different states.

Public utility commissions regulate the monopoly utilities that operate in each state, voting on such matters as what power plants utilities can build and how much money they can charge their captive customers. Each state’s PUC contains three to five commissioners, making the officials some of the most powerful people in the U.S. energy transition. In most states, governors appoint these leaders — but in 10 states, voters elect them.

This November, eight of those states have active races for at least one PUC commissioner: Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and South Dakota. Georgia canceled its 2024 PUC elections because the state’s bizarre hybrid structure for PUC elections has resulted in a lawsuit claiming voter discrimination: PUC commissioners each represent one of five districts, but they are elected statewide, so the members of each district don’t get to decide who represents them.

Utilities recognize the importance of supporting candidates who share their interests, and spend money accordingly. But most regular people often feel little personal connection to the races or the arcane bureaucracy that unfolds at the commissions, and it can be hard to focus on these details against the raucous political backdrop of a general election.

“These PUC commissioners have the power to determine people’s utility bills, the quality of their utility service, and how their utilities are making investments in different forms of energy,” PUC advocate Charles Hua told Canary Media. ​“Yet, few people can name their state’s PUC commissioners or explain what they do.”

After stints at the Department of Energy and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Hua launched a nonprofit called PowerLines this fall to promote greater public awareness of the pivotal roles PUCs play in the clean energy transition. As a nonpartisan entity, PowerLines can’t endorse candidates, but Hua sees plenty of value in simply increasing participation in PUC elections.

That information gap around PUCs leads to ​“down-ballot dropoff,” in which voters select candidates in the better-known races but leave the PUC section blank, Hua said. That means voters miss out on ​“a democratic vehicle to engage with the public officials that are meant to serve the public interest through effective utility regulation.”

The implications for good utility regulation are especially high this year for anyone interested in the transition to cleaner energy, not to mention equity and affordability.

Commissioners control how much electric and gas utilities can charge customers, at a time of soaring energy bills. They’re also uniquely positioned to help get the U.S. grid on track to meet climate goals, at least on a state-by-state level, by approving more cheap, clean energy instead of letting utilities continue to expand fossil-fueled infrastructure. And PUCs can direct utilities to rebuild their grids in a more resilient way following destructive extreme weather like hurricanes Helene and Milton.

PUC commissioners wade through the technocratic morass of utility regulation and make choices that affect Americans’ pocketbooks. That’s why Hua says it’s so important for those who have the opportunity to vote in PUC races to do so, and to keep an eye on what their commission does the rest of the time.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at Arizona and Louisiana, two states where the stakes for the clean energy transition are particularly high this year.

Arizona could return to ambitious clean energy policy

Three of five seats are up for the Grand Canyon State’s PUC, which is called the Arizona Corporation Commission. Anna Tovar, the lone Democrat on the commission, is not running for reelection, nor is Republican James O’Connor. Republican Lea Márquez Peterson is running for another four-year term.

Arizonans get to vote statewide for the slate of PUC commissioners, and the top three vote-getters each win a seat. There are three Democrats and three Republicans running, and Arizona’s closely contested recent election cycles mean anything could happen — the commission could swing in a more pro–clean energy direction, or toward more fossil-friendly regulation.

That’s significant, because the ACC’s recent past illustrates the power of elected PUCs more clearly than perhaps in any other state. In 2018, the all-Republican commission boldly rebuked the planning proposal from the state’s largest utility, Arizona Public Service. Then the commissioners went further, imposing a moratorium on new gas plant construction, based on conservative principles: With the energy sector changing so quickly, they wouldn’t let utilities charge their customers for a bunch of expensive gas plants when other quickly maturing options could prove more cost-effective.

Those commissioners later developed their own clean energy standard, and nearly approved it, which would have been a rare instance of a proactive clean energy target coming from a PUC instead of a legislature. But the commission’s debate dragged on as state politics became increasingly contentious, and the proposal was ultimately voted down 3-2 in January 2022. Early this year, the commission voted to end the meager renewable energy standard that had been on the books for 15 years.

In AZ Central’s survey of PUC candidate views, Democrats Ylenia Aguilar, Jonathon Hill, and Joshua Polacheck each affirmed that they want Arizona to tap into more of its renewable power potential. If elected, they could push to revive the clean electricity standard, although that would be a long shot. They could also push to strengthen policies for energy efficiency and distributed energy.

That’s not to say the Republicans oppose clean energy — they just equate binding clean energy targets with adding costs for customers, which they oppose.

For instance, Márquez Peterson says she ​“supports the voluntary commitments made by our utilities for 100 percent clean and affordable energy by 2050 for Arizona.” She also wants to ​“avoid costly mandates and corporate subsidies.” Republican Rachel Walden told AZ Central that ​“forced energy investments and climate goals put the ratepayer last and thwart free market principles.”

This line of argument leaves it to utilities to pursue their own corporate targets. As it happens, solar power in dry, sunny Arizona is ridiculously cheap, and the utilities have jumped on the trend. But the lack of a long-term roadmap for the state leaves room for more gas construction in the meantime, and complicates the kind of long-term planning needed to achieve a carbon-free grid in the coming decades.

Whoever wins, the commission is sure to face capacious gas-plant proposals from utilities to meet soaring demand for data centers and new chip factories (plus some lithium-ion battery manufacturing) in the Phoenix area.

Louisiana to replace swing vote on energy issues

Louisiana’s PUC just did something the state government never accomplished: pass a modern energy-efficiency program to save households money. Now one of the architects of that program is retiring, and voters can pick his replacement.

Advocates had pushed for such a program for years, but it finally passed thanks to two commissioners with seemingly dissimilar perspectives: progressive Democrat Davante Lewis, who campaigned on climate justice; and Republican Craig Greene, a former LSU football player and orthopedic surgeon who supports market-based reforms. They both found common ground in the desire to push the state’s monopoly utility to invest in measures to reduce wasteful energy consumption and thereby save customers money. The commissioners recently selected a third-party administrator to run this program.

“Commissioner Greene has been an important champion for things like energy efficiency, and has even taken steps to move renewable energy forward in the state,” said Logan Burke, executive director of the Louisiana consumer advocacy nonprofit Alliance for Affordable Energy. ​“The seat he is in has historically been considered a ​‘swing’ vote between the two red and two blue districts.”

But Greene decided not to seek reelection as a commissioner, which in Louisiana is a part-time role. That means his seat in District 2 is up for grabs: If Greene’s successor doesn’t share his support for the efficiency measures, it could jeopardize the fledgling, long-awaited program. And this swing vote could prove decisive in decisions on new power-plant construction to meet an expected surge in electricity demand.

Democrat Nick Laborde is competing with Republicans Jean-Paul Coussan and Julie Quinn for the seat. Some 70 percent of voters in this district picked Donald Trump for president in 2020, according to the local outlet Louisiana Illuminator.

Laborde has business experience running a consulting firm and serving as product manager at NOLA Crawfish Bread, an unusually delicious experience for a prospective utility regulator. He has said he supports more renewables and wants to ​“make utilities pay more instead of raising your bill.”

Coussan’s campaign website doesn’t say much about his views on the energy system, but he does promise to regulate as ​“a true conservative watchdog, and someone who understands the importance of the role that affordable and reliable energy plays in bringing jobs to our state.” That assertion could mean Coussan would stand up to utility attempts to raise rates on customers; then again, utilities in Louisiana and elsewhere have used an emphasis on ​“reliability” to push for expensive gas-plant construction in circumstances of dubious value.

Quinn promises to ​“rein in unnecessary utility company spending that results in rising utility rates,” and to ​“oppose liberal-thinking Green New Deal initiatives that are unrealistic and costly.” But one target of Biden administration clean energy funding has piqued her interest: Quinn would like to ​“explore micro-nuclear facilities to lower utility rates.” No commercial microreactor has been built on the U.S. grid, much less lowered anyone’s rates, despite years of trying.

The Alliance for Affordable Energy does not endorse candidates, per the rules governing 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Instead, the group focuses on get-out-the-vote efforts and education about the commission, Burke told Canary Media. She’s also keeping an eye on what candidates say about transmission planning and expansion, which could open up vast new supplies of clean energy for the state.

“If we don’t get the transmission planning we need, we’ll just get 40 more years of new gas plants,” Burke said. ​“That won’t help anyone but Entergy,” the state’s largest monopoly utility.

Clean energy is on the ballot in these utility regulator races is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

The one thing Kamala Harris and Donald Trump seem to agree on is that the road to the White House runs through Pennsylvania, the nation’s most populous swing state. 

October polls show an even split in the Keystone State, and its 19 Electoral College votes could well decide the election. Not a week went by in September without one or more visits from each campaign. And Pennsylvania is where Harris and Trump met face-to-face for their first and only debate, during which both candidates vied to convince Americans that they can deliver more prosperity. Harris wants to grow the economy in part by continuing the clean energy manufacturing policies enacted by the Biden administration; Trump wants to roll them back.

Given the immense electoral stakes, I decided to visit the state to see if the idea of a clean energy future is resonating with Pennsylvanians and how that transition is starting to materialize in a place where coal, oil, and gas have reigned supreme since the 1800s.

Pennsylvania’s coal abundance jump-started the transition away from burning wood as a primary energy source. Coal later made the state the steelmaking capital of America and powered the nation for decades. Meanwhile, oil production surged beginning in 1859, when Edwin Drake tapped the country’s first oil well at Titusville, and the state led U.S. oil production through the end of that century. 

More recently, when engineers commercialized fracking in the 2000s, the Marcellus Shale, which stretches under Pennsylvania, quickly became the biggest shale-gas-producing region in the nation. 

Now, though, Pennsylvania is at a crossroads: The resources that fueled Pennsylvania’s past growth are plateauing or petering out.

“Coal employment has gone off a cliff,” said Seth Blumsack, who runs the Center for Energy Law and Policy at Penn State. ​“You had an influx of natural gas jobs — that growth has largely leveled off, as Pennsylvania hit this kind of steady state of gas production.”

This isn’t the first time Pennsylvania’s core economic drivers have waned. Factories and steel mills took a beating in the 1970s and 1980s, as foreign producers competed in earnest with America’s industrial machine. Plants that sustained whole towns closed down, with nothing to replace them. The ironworks Andrew Carnegie built in 1875 still operates on the bank of the Monongahela River, but owner U.S. Steel is desperately trying to unload it to Japan’s Nippon Steel.

These conditions have created new opportunities for the clean energy transition to take hold. Political leaders like Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and business owners are embracing low-carbon industry as an economic development strategy for the energy-rich state. 

Shapiro has pushed to strengthen the state’s outdated clean energy standard for power production, and he signed a bill this summer to establish ground rules for developing carbon-sequestration projects. His administration recently won $400 million in federal funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“the second-largest federal grant in Pennsylvania’s history,” a spokesperson for the governor pointed out). Pennsylvania will disburse that money in competitive grants to industrial entities proportional to their ambitions at carbon reduction; the Shapiro administration wants the ensuing projects to slash statewide industrial emissions 10 percent by 2050. 

Given the state’s long history of oil and gas, hydrogen production is sure to loom large. In the lower-carbon future, clean hydrogen could become the next key energy commodity. Last year, Biden’s Department of Energy awarded seven proposed hydrogen hubs around the country roughly $1 billion each. Pennsylvania, as Shapiro regularly points out, was the only state to win funding for two: The Philadelphia-based hub is slated to produce hydrogen with nuclear power and renewables, while the Pittsburgh-based hub will focus on turning fossil gas into hydrogen and stowing the ensuing emissions underground.

But Pennsylvania’s industrial decarbonization is just getting started.

“You’re not seeing the finished product, but so many things are falling into place,” said John Carlson, who oversees state policy engagement in the region for Clean Air Task Force, a climate-solutions think tank. 

Clean energy manufacturing, though, is already beginning to put Pennsylvanians to work. A few entrepreneurs have retooled historic Pittsburgh-area factories to turn iron and zinc into batteries that store power from the sun and wind. Steelworkers forge the backbone that holds phalanxes of solar panels, bolstering America’s fastest-growing source of electricity.

Pennsylvania has fallen behind other states in building clean power plants, but renewables developers are getting more ambitious. In Clearfield County, northeast of Pittsburgh, developer Swift Current Energy is building the biggest solar plant in the commonwealth on 2,700 acres of reclaimed mine land. 

“There’s this huge industrial knowledge base in Pennsylvania,” Blumsack said, ​“and people who want to work, and so how do you harness that?”

From coal and gas to hydrogen

The Marcellus Shale arcs from southwest to northeast Pennsylvania, undergirding the state physically and economically. 

Other states talk of phasing out fossil fuel extraction to tackle their planet-warming emissions. In Pennsylvania, Shapiro, working with split control of the legislature in Harrisburg, speaks pragmatically of harnessing the state’s mineral wealth for the goal of decarbonization. In her Pennsylvania debate appearance, Vice President Harris renounced her earlier opposition to fracking: ​“Let’s talk about fracking, because we’re here in Pennsylvania. I made that very clear in 2020. I will not ban fracking.” Such is the gravitational pull of the Marcellus.

But talking about pumping fossil fuels while decarbonizing is much easier than doing it. So I ventured through the corduroy-like ridges of the Appalachian foothills to a place where people are working to make it happen: Penn State, formed as an agricultural school in 1855 and now home to nearly 50,000 students in a bucolic town aptly named State College.

Sanjay Srinivasan greeted me outside the beige concrete structure that houses the Energy Institute, where the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences conducts research to unlock lower-carbon opportunities for the state. 

I did a double take as we approached the building — the sign on the exterior wall said ​“Coal Utilization Laboratory,” a relic of the not-so-distant past. In the lobby, we passed displays of actual coal in all its dark glory: an uninterrupted column of bituminous stretching to the ceiling, a pyramidal sampler of anthracite designated by colloquial gradations like Egg, Chestnut, Pea, and the fine little pebbles of No. 3 Buckwheat.

“We are interested in doing anything that we can to help communities in the Pennsylvania Appalachian region transition to the new energy economy,” Srinivasan told me. 

The institute approaches that task by looking for existing energy infrastructure it can repurpose. That means researching ways to extract critical minerals from the region’s mining waste ponds and fly ash piles, or tap hot briny water in abandoned mines as a heat source for buildings. And, thanks to the billion-dollar hub grant from the DOE, western Pennsylvania could turn its fossil fuels into hydrogen to clean up heavy vehicles and industry.

“In this part of the world, the formations can be used for storing hydrogen. But better still, can we use the shale gas for producing hydrogen and then develop a closed-loop process where you don’t emit anything into the atmosphere?” Srinivasan posited.

Almost all hydrogen made today comes from blasting methane with steam at high pressure, which yields hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide. The machines that do this, called steam methane reformers, historically just vent the CO₂ into the atmosphere. U.S. hydrogen production is highly concentrated in the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor, where refineries use the gas in their production process.

The Appalachian hub is planning to fund efforts, like the KeyState project in Clinton County, to make hydrogen this old-fashioned way but then inject the CO₂ stream underground for geological storage. The DOE concluded negotiations with this hub in July, kicking off the active planning phase, which could last for three years.

The Gulf Coast has successfully sequestered carbon that oil companies pumped underground to push out more oil. In Pennsylvania, operators and researchers have yet to prove this is commercially feasible. The plan, Srinivasan told me, is to drill down 8,000 to 10,000 feet, through the Marcellus Shale, through the Geneseo Shale, to the Oriskany Sandstone. The shale formations above would act as a cap on the carbon dioxide. The National Science Foundation recently funded Penn State to study the Appalachian Basin’s carbon-sequestration potential.

Many climate advocates doubt that hydrogen production from fossil fuels will ever be particularly clean. That said, hydrogen producers elsewhere have proved that they can achieve high rates of carbon capture at steam methane reformers, noted Sam Bailey, industrial decarbonization manager at Clean Air Task Force. Pennsylvania operators would also need to secure low-carbon electricity to run their operations, and buy methane from a supply chain that isn’t leaky.

“Some producers in the region have some of the lowest leak rates, but those obviously have to be verifiable and transparent,” Bailey said. 

The mid-Atlantic hydrogen hub, centered around Philadelphia, would focus on electrolysis powered by offshore wind and nuclear power. The Shapiro administration expects both hubs to create 41,000 jobs, though the DOE estimates the hubs will take eight to 12 years to fully materialize.

There might be other pathways for turning fossil gas into clean hydrogen. Down the hallway, Srinivasan’s colleague showed me a tabletop device that performs what’s called thermocatalytic decomposition: The machine essentially cooks methane at low temperatures until it lets out pure hydrogen and inert, solid carbon. That would be much simpler than catching and injecting gaseous carbon deep underground.

The tabletop version I saw is still ​“frontier technology,” Srinivasan cautioned, made possible by recent advances in catalyst efficiency. But it could be a good fit for smaller installations to catch methane leaking out of Pennsylvania’s many abandoned coal mines. Modular decomposers could convert those decentralized streams of intensely planet-warming gas into harmless carbon solids that can be used as industrial feedstocks. 

Pittsburgh steel goes solar

The town of Leetsdale hugs the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh, surrounded by sprawling industrial complexes and freight lines. During World War II, Bethlehem Steel fashioned barges and landing craft there. Historians describe that war as a clash of steel that the U.S. won because its factories cranked out more tanks, planes, and ships than its opponents.

Most of those factories are long gone, but JM Steel, an affiliate of the century-old company Jennmar, took over a site in Leetsdale one year ago and reopened it with a new mission: bending steel to the will of the burgeoning solar industry. Its preliminary success shows how federal clean energy policy is breathing new life into Pennsylvania’s legacy industries — exactly what the hydrogen hubs are supposed to do.

When I rolled up to the riverside lot, the factory looked like it was fortified for some kind of invasion. Thirty-foot steel tubes had been trussed up by the dozen and stacked to form an impenetrable barricade taller than a person. 

Pittsburgh native Chris Bartley led me through the steely labyrinth, explaining that these pipes were torque tubes ready to ship. His employer, Nextracker, uses the tubes to mount huge numbers of solar panels that can change their angle throughout the day.

Early in the solar revolution, developers installed panels in fixed positions, at what seemed like the most advantageous angle. Silicon Valley startup Nextracker revolutionized the market by attaching panels to trackers that follow the sun’s arc, and pivot away from dangers like hail or high wind. This innovation enhanced solar power output and made Nextracker one of cleantech’s clearest commercial successes: It went public in 2023 and now trades with a market cap over $5 billion. To supply its booming business, Nextracker enlists specialists like JM Steel to sculpt metal to its specifications.

In a little meeting room off the factory floor, Negley Rodgers, who oversees plant operations for family-owned JM Steel, told me the plant ships an average of six truckloads of torque tubes per day — 350,000 torque tubes since last October. They go straight to solar plants in the region, where the tons of steel translate to megawatts of cheap, clean power rushing onto the grid.

We donned hard hats, earplugs, and orange scratch-resistant sleeves for my exposed forearms, then walked into the cavernous factory. First we saw the ​“master coils” of rolled-up flat steel that the company buys from domestic producers like Nucor and SDI. The coils don’t look overwhelmingly large, but are so heavy that flatbed trucks can carry only one at a time, Rodgers noted. The high-ceilinged factory has a built-in crane capable of lifting 40 tons to maneuver the coils into position.

Workers feed these coils into machines that use heat and immense force to roll the flat material into thick round pipes. Another station drills the holes that will attach the solar panels. JM adjusts the drilling arrangement for each project — some use bigger panels, some smaller, but the company can accommodate them all on the same production line. 

Before Covid-19, Nextracker relied on a more typical globalized supply chain. Then CEO Dan Shugar decided to localize tracker production to where his customers operated around the world: Solar plants would get trackers made nearby, so nothing got stuck in port overseas. A couple of years later, the IRA sweetened the deal with meaningful financial incentives to produce solar-power components domestically.

The Inflation Reduction Act created an 87-cent-per-kilogram tax credit for torque tube manufacturing. Additionally, solar developers can access an extra 10 percent tax credit for their power plants by hitting a critical mass of domestic components, per an IRS rubric. Trackers include torque tubes, rails, controllers, and motors, Bartley explained; sourcing all those components in the U.S. unlocks a bonus, which nets 24.7 percent coverage for the overall solar project. 

The exact level of domestic content varies by project, based on what a developer is looking for. A U.S.-made tracker creates flexibility for how the company sources other components while still meeting the IRS cutoff.

Conventional corporate wisdom long held that offshoring production to China cut costs and improved profits. Sourcing a 100 percent domestic tracker still adds a premium, Bartley said, but it’s already possible to make most of the system here without driving up cost.

“Looking at our cost of a tracker fully delivered to a job site, we’re seeing really competitive costs and pricing [while] making a significant part of the tracker domestically,” he said. ​“As time goes on, we’re expecting any sort of premium like that to go down, because we’re expanding capacity of these other components, like our electronic components.” 

Part of that favorable comparison to foreign imports has to do with the inescapable heft of this product: ​“They’re not shipping nuts and bolts that they can pack into a tight box on a ship,” said Rodgers. ​“They’re shipping these large, 30-foot-long, five-inch diameter tubes that take up a massive amount of volume on a ship.”

Steel companies have opened 20 factory sites across the U.S. that exclusively produce torque tubes for Nextracker; the factories wouldn’t exist without the demand from the booming solar market. JM ships from Pittsburgh to places like Indiana, Illinois, and Tennessee, but business in Pennsylvania has been picking up, as evidenced by the blockbuster Mineral Basin Solar project. That one will put 400 megawatts on reclaimed mining land northeast of Pittsburgh. The power and its clean energy credits will actually flow to New York, but millions of dollars of lease payments and tax revenues will stay in the county.

For JM Steel, the imperative to decarbonize has given new urgency to the skills and products that Pittsburgh long excelled at. At the same time, U.S. Steel is trying to unload its flagship Pittsburgh steel plant to a Japanese company, arguing that it’s the only way to remain commercially viable. I asked Rodgers if that deal signaled the end of an era for American steelmakers.

“I can’t comment on that,” he said, referring to U.S. Steel’s position. ​“Just — manufacturing is still viable, and it’s still happening in the United States.”

Indeed, the growing pressure on big steel buyers to source lower-carbon or ​“green” steel could give U.S. companies an edge on overseas competition. The U.S. already uses a high proportion of electric arc furnaces to melt scrap metal into new products; those can run on clean electricity to further curb their carbon footprint. The industry is also exploring ways to decarbonize the carbon-intensive conversion of iron ores to metallic iron, by using clean hydrogen instead of coal. Pennsylvania doesn’t have any of those facilities operating yet — the world’s first large-scale commercial plant of this kind is under construction in Sweden. But the hubs aim to bring clean hydrogen supply to greater Pittsburgh, and the DOE has funded steel companies to build initial facilities to use it.

For now, JM Steel’s plant serves Nextracker’s needs with some 53 employees — a welcome addition, but not close to the scale of employment at the site in bygone decades. For clean energy buyers or green steel customers to make a mark on the regional economy, they’ll need to put many more people to work.

Reopening factories for battery breakthroughs

Solar panels planted on Pittsburgh steel clean up the grid during sunny hours. But as solar generation provides ever more electricity, new energy storage technologies will be needed to turn cheap renewables into round-the-clock power. 

Federal policymakers hope to bring battery manufacturing back to the U.S. after China pulled far ahead in its capacity to make lithium-ion batteries. It’s extremely difficult to catch up to competitors who are already producing at tremendous scale — the recent financial struggles at Europe’s Northvolt attest to that. Pittsburgh, though, has become a hub for fabricating novel battery technologies that aren’t made anywhere else in the world, a risky strategy with the potential for a big payoff.

Habitually cash-strapped startup Eos makes zinc-based batteries at the junction of Turtle Creek and the Monongahela. For decades, Westinghouse built electrical generators on the site that powered the Hoover Dam and other icons of modern America. Nikola Tesla once toiled there, as did more than 20,000 workers in the plant’s heyday. But Westinghouse shuttered the Turtle Creek plant in 1988, gutting the economy of the surrounding Mon Valley.

Now Eos employs 300 people to manufacture energy storage in 150,000 square feet of the old Westinghouse complex. If the unconventional product takes off, Eos could expand and further boost the local economy — but that’s a big if.

Eos has toiled, since 2008, to commercialize a new type of battery that could beat lithium-ion on fire safety and cost for longer-duration energy storage. Lithium-ion batteries almost always win customers looking to deliver stored power for four hours, and increasingly five or six. Beyond that, lithium-ion gets prohibitively expensive. Eos markets its batteries as capable of delivering power for three to 12 hours, which runs the gamut from the incumbent technology’s sweet spot to a storage duration that few customers have ever purchased.

That’s a tough market to break into, and Eos survived its first decade with little commercial traction to show for it. In 2019, the board brought in a new management team, a crew of GE veterans, led by CEO Joe Mastrangelo. He stopped outsourcing fabrication to contractors in China and localized production in Pittsburgh. 

I met Mastrangelo in a conference room above the factory. He wore thick-framed glasses and a company hoodie, lime-green logo on forest green. The outfit reminded me of Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman (D), who famously bucked tradition and wore hoodies in the halls of power. Mastrangelo pointed out that Fetterman lived a mile down the street in Braddock, where he used to be mayor, in a house overlooking the U.S. Steel plant. 

Reshoring the supply chain surely saved Eos during Covid-19, Mastrangelo explained. If production had frozen for a couple of years when China closed its factories, ​“we would have been done.” Eos also avoided under-discussed costs of offshoring, like lengthy, expensive flights to China to check on manufacturing progress. Eos built the factory with its own money — a rare feat in the incentive-happy cleantech factory boom — but found itself ready to capitalize on the domestic manufacturing incentives created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.

Downstairs, I saw the fully automated line that Eos installed in June, capable of producing 1.2 gigawatt-hours per year. The machinery sat inside a wire-fenced perimeter. A succession of robots picked up gray plastic boxes, stocked them with Eos’ proprietary electrodes, then injected them with a liquid electrolyte in two carefully calibrated gushes, to prevent it from foaming and spilling.

Eos employees patrolled the perimeter, many of them wearing the same green-on-green hoodie as their CEO. Their job was to keep the machines running: When a robot got confused, or the operating controls hit a glitch, alarms sounded and the technicians hurried over. This happened throughout my tour; as I’d seen in other cleantech factories, ​“full automation” is more aspirational than descriptive.

The bustling factory embodies the theory that Pennsylvania’s abandoned factories can spring to life to serve the material needs of the clean energy revolution. Pennsylvania’s minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, but Eos’ average wage is above $20, Mastrangelo said. Employees get a 3 percent direct contribution to their 401(k), and regular grants of company stock (Eos went public in 2020 via a special-purpose acquisition company). ​“We also view this as a massive opportunity for everybody to get wealth creation,” Mastrangelo said.

But startups are unsteady vessels for economic growth, and Eos’ finances are more unstable than most. 

Last year, Eos spent $169 million to make $16.4 million in revenue. It’s normal for a startup to lose money while ramping up commercial production. But Eos’ public listing failed to net enough money to fully fund the buildout, so it has repeatedly beseeched investors for more infusions (like $100 million from Koch in 2021). This summer, Nasdaq nearly booted Eos for trading below $1 a share for too long. 

Mastrangelo escaped that ignominy by closing a $325 million commitment from a domestic supply chain–focused fund at private equity firm Cerberus, on June 24, in the form of a loan with stock warrants (and surely one or two strings attached). Since then, Eos’ share price soared all the way past $3.

With this private-equity lifeline in hand, Mastrangelo has faith that demand for his unusual batteries will pick up. Eos is commissioning a 35-megawatt-hour storage system serving a microgrid on a Native American reservation in Northern California, funded by a California Energy Commission grant for long-duration storage. That customer already signed up for an expansion to 60 megawatt-hours. Eos also delivered a 10-megawatt/4-megawatt-hour standalone system in Texas for Pittsburgh-based developer IEP. These are small potatoes compared with lithium-ion battery projects, but substantial for the ragtag category of erstwhile lithium alternatives. 

“The one thing we’ve always told everybody is, the market needs a product like ours,” Mastrangelo said. ​“We continue to do things that haven’t been done before, and we just have to keep executing on our plan, and eventually the market will reward performance.”

An even more unusual battery is being fabricated about 36 miles west of downtown Pittsburgh. This one, designed by Form Energy, uses iron as a cheap storage material and promises to deliver clean power for up to 100 hours, far beyond what lithium-ion batteries can handle affordably. Unlike Eos, Form had no trouble lining up venture capital investment and hundreds of millions of state and federal dollars to fund its buildout; in fact, the company just closed another $405 million equity investment on October 9.

Form took barely a year to transform the slag-studded field of an abandoned steel mill into a gleaming new factory. Its white outer wall rises like a curtain to reveal a transparent entranceway, highlighted in the company’s trademark orange. Inside, an airy vestibule lined with greenery and an exhibit on the town’s industrial history gives way to the 550,000-square-foot production zone. 

“We wanted it to be an inviting place,” CEO Mateo Jaramillo told me from a glass room on the mezzanine level, suspended above the factory floor. ​“It should feel like innovation. It should feel like something new. It should feel like a safe, clean place to work.”

Form developed its technology at labs near Berkeley and MIT, then expanded to a facility in the tiny town of Eighty Four, outside Pittsburgh. The company doubled down on the region for its full-fledged factory, and landed several hundred million dollars in state incentives from West Virginia to locate in that state, in the former steel town of Weirton. Pittsburgh is the closest big city to Weirton, and many of the workers commute from Pennsylvania. The success of this factory, like JM Steel or Eos, speaks to Appalachia’s ability to seize the clean energy era for its economic revival.

Form chose a factory site rich in symbolic resonance: The startup is claiming a spot in the industrial landscape of the Ohio River Valley, creating jobs where the legacy industries seem capable only of shedding them (steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs was clinging on next door, but idled that operation in April; the company hopes to reopen the site to make electrical transformers starting in 2026). Form even uses iron, the same material that, with coal, fueled the region’s steel boom. 

These layers of narrative meaning play swimmingly at ribbon cuttings, but I was curious what they offer once the tax incentives are secured. Jaramillo acknowledged that ​“grand poetry” isn’t what makes batteries.

“On the day-to-day, we don’t think a lot about the precise industrial legacy — we’ve got a job to do, so we go do the job,” Jaramillo said. ​“That’s probably the most direct legacy, is people who are really oriented on taking care of the job.”

Form has seen ​“huge demand” for open positions, and Jaramillo reported no problems finding the quality and number of workers needed. The company promised the state of West Virginia that salaries will average at least $63,000 per year — well above minimum wage, and substantial in a region with low costs of living. 

So far, Form runs a single shift per day, for 10 or 12 hours. Some 300 people work at the factory, but that should grow to 750 in a few years, Jaramillo said. The plan is to quintuple capacity from 2025 to 2026, and quadruple it again from 2026 to 2027, at which point the factory will make 500 megawatts per year; for the long-duration format, that translates to 50,000 megawatt-hours. 

The Pittsburgh metro area scores quite high for its capability to manufacture a range of clean energy technologies, per economic development analysis by climate think tank RMI. 

Eos and Form were the first major battery makers to turn that potential into real jobs. Neither technology has been deployed on the grid in sufficient scale to ensure its longevity as a climate solution; that work lies ahead of them. But they demonstrate that it’s possible for the decarbonization mission to reanimate long-abandoned factories and put Pennsylvania’s workers back on the line.

Over two centuries, Pennsylvania’s energy resources brought clear gains in jobs and wealth. The nascent industrial decarbonization transition needs many more years of dedicated federal and local support before it can credibly substitute for the legacy energy economy. That’s not a convenient timetable for Democrats trying to make the case now for a Harris administration, and yet the outcome of the election will have an enormous impact on whether that support continues.

Can energy-rich Pennsylvania chart a path toward decarbonization? is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

DETROIT—In 1913, Henry Ford unveiled the moving assembly line at his Highland Park plant, reducing the time it took to make a Model T from 12 hours to 93 minutes and igniting a revolution in modern manufacturing. He later perfected the intricate choreography of worker and machine at the 600-acre Rouge plant, which opened in 1920.

On a sunny late-summer afternoon, I stood on a catwalk at the Rouge, peering down at the modern incarnation of that century-old industrial system. Half-built F-150 pickups rolled from station to station at four miles per hour. Each employee had about 45 seconds to perform their task — install a center console, affix a windshield, hook up the truck-bed door.

Ford’s industrial efficiency helped convert America, and eventually much of the world, to automotive transportation, and his factories attracted thousands of workers to Detroit. By the 1920s, it was the nation’s fourth largest city; in 1950 its population peaked at nearly 2 million. Early-20^th-century Ford Motor Company casts a mythic aura over Detroit to this day.

“We’re steeped in our heritage,” said Liesl Clark, an architect of Michigan climate policy who now teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. ​“We think a lot about being the state that put the world on wheels. We take a lot of pride in that.”

But Detroit’s industrial joyride hit speed bumps in the second half of the 20^th century as the auto industry grappled with technological change, globalization, automation, and supply chains shifting south, Jonathan Smith, senior chief deputy director at the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, told me. As the jobs disappeared, Detroit’s population began emptying out; last year, it stood at just 633,218.

Now something new is stirring along the banks of the Detroit River. The city just notched its first year of population growth since 1957. A few buildings over from the clockwork marvel of Ford’s F-150 plant, another operation cranks out the electric version of the truck, loaded with a battery pack so powerful it can run a whole home. Farther afield, nascent battery plants are in the works, aiming to supply the Big Three automakers with American-made components for their emerging EV lineups.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat elected in 2018, has launched an ambitious effort to reinvigorate Michigan’s remaining industrial base by retooling it for the low-carbon era. Crucially, Whitmer led her party to win majorities in the House and Senate in 2022, giving Democrats full control of state government for the first time in nearly 40 years. They used that popular mandate to pass a series of climate laws last fall, including one of the nation’s most ambitious clean electricity targets. Whitmer has directed hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds to a slew of cleantech factories where workers will make batteries for electric vehicles and new technologies to clean up buildings and electricity production.

Michigan is not the only state actively pursuing new factory investment; its efforts coincide with a generational shift in the nation’s capital, where politicians of both parties are disavowing neoliberal offshoring and embracing policies intended to bring manufacturing back to American shores. President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, incentivizes domestic production of electric vehicles and other energy technologies. But given its industrial legacy and highly trained workforce, Michigan is arguably the state best positioned to make the most of this new economic era.

“It was hard to find a lot of benefit for Michigan workers in … the globalization of some of these key industries, whereas Michigan workers absolutely can benefit from the reshoring and onshoring of existing critical technologies and new technologies of the future that there’s now a policy commitment to see built here in the United States,” Smith told me.

If Michigan’s bet on new clean energy manufacturing works out, it would offer the clearest test case nationally of the Biden-Harris strategy to make clean energy the engine of manufacturing revival. Of the top five states leading the climatetech factory buildout, per a tally by researcher Jack Conness, it’s the only one with unified state Democratic control, not to mention a strong and historically powerful union presence. 

“Michigan’s package [of climate legislation] is really significant because it’s in a manufacturing state, it’s in a state where we understand industry,” said Clark, who previously ran Michigan’s environmental regulatory body for Whitmer. ​“We know we’re going to have to squeeze all the carbon we can out of industry, and we’re going to do that in a partnership with industry, so that we’re also getting the economic-development advantage as we’re moving along that road.”

At the same time, Michigan is one of the most closely divided swing states likely to decide the election between Vice President Kamala Harris, who vows to continue the clean energy policies she helped pass, and former President Donald Trump, who has threatened to undo them.

Michigan broke for Trump in 2016 by around 11,000 votes, part of the shattered ​“blue wall” that ushered him into the White House. In 2020, Michigan rejected Trump by 150,000 votes. Harris and Trump were neck and neck in the state’s September polling. Democrats may be ascendant in Lansing, but among the waterfront palaces of Grosse Pointe and the lakeside cornfields of the Thumb, the Trump-Vance signs come out in force.

I wanted to assess just how far Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing transformation has come ahead of the 2024 election. After a week of factory visits and interviews with business leaders and policymakers, it was clear that this revolution is further along in Michigan than almost anywhere else in the U.S. It’s also barely getting started.

Private companies have pledged more than $11 billion to build clean energy factories and projects in Michigan, by Conness’ count. Advocacy group Climate Power tallies more like $18 billion for cleantech factories, not counting clean power-plant commitments — money that’s expected to produce nearly 22,000 jobs. 

But many of the big-ticket factories announced so far have yet to break ground. Michiganders are feeling only a fraction of the benefits the clean manufacturing boom could furnish; the full effects won’t come until long after the 2024 election is decided. That delay could jeopardize the whole project. For this battery-powered economic revival to succeed, the supporting policies that kicked it off need to stay on the books. 

A battery factory in miniature

Detroit emanates from its namesake river like half a wheel, spokes flaring from the cluster of art deco skyscrapers at its center. I followed one of those spokes west past Dearborn, home to Ford and now a thriving Yemeni community, to a flat green land dotted by factories that look like oversized boxes. One of the largest of these houses Our Next Energy, a startup founded in 2020 by materials scientist Mujeeb Ijaz to bring back domestic production of the lithium ferrous phosphate (LFP) battery chemistry. 

This technology uses cheaper, more widely accessible materials and operates more safely than the nickel-based battery chemistries that have reigned in the EV market. But the first major U.S. company to commercialize it, A123 Systems, went bankrupt more than a decade ago when, among other setbacks, actual demand for EV batteries lagged behind industry hopes. A123 was ultimately sold to a Chinese firm, and several Chinese companies successfully scaled up LFP production, making it a viable choice for EV batteries even though it lacks the cell-level energy density of the nickel chemistries. Ijaz saw this unfold firsthand while leading vehicle battery development for A123. Years later, he thought the time was ripe to try again.

It took me a few tries to find the right door at Our Next Energy’s enormous complex. Once inside, an operations manager for the plant had me cover up my hair, don a dark blue lab coat, and slip on little coverups for my leather shoes. Just before we walked onto the factory floor, he instructed me to tell him if I felt dehydrated, because we were entering a controlled zone of near-zero humidity.

Our first stop was the anode room, where Our Next Energy makes the negative end of the battery. Inside a tall, shiny, 100-liter metal tank, a dough hook mixes a sludge of gray metal powder; a separate machine extrudes this graphite slurry onto a roll of copper, printing an anode. 

A parallel system across the room does the same for the lithium iron phosphate cathode, which goes on aluminum foil. Both the anodes and the cathodes then go through an oven that solidifies and dehydrates them, after which they’re sliced into uniform sheets. Then comes assembly: An automated machine stacks alternating sheets of anode and cathode with a separator weaving in between. The resulting stack gets stuffed into a metal box and filled with a liquid electrolyte. After some quality checks, it’s ready to power a car. 

And that’s where the tour ended. The 10 megawatt-hour ​“proto line” I saw was fine-tuning samples for potential customers; it occupied a mere corner of the 660,000-square-foot factory, which sat mostly empty. 

The mini-factory proves that American workers are capable of producing the up-and-coming LFP batteries. But the battery market, like the solar-panel market, is all about scale, and that’s what Our Next Energy currently lacks. 

The company has suffered a series of recent financial setbacks. It went out for Series C venture funding last year, but couldn’t close the deal (that was a tough time for climate venture capital broadly). To keep things running, management laid off 128 staff in November, roughly 25 percent of the workforce. In December, the board booted founder Ijaz from the CEO spot (but kept him around as chief technology officer) and replaced him with board member Paul Humphries, who held multiple executive roles at Flex, the global manufacturing specialist.

Earlier this year, Humphries fired more staff and convinced existing investors to fund the company’s operations through the end of this year. That pushed off the startup’s nagging existential questions for a while.

After the factory tour, I drove half an hour to the small city of Novi to visit Our Next Energy’s corporate headquarters, a glassy, open-floor-plan affair tucked into the wooded, pond-dotted Michigan landscape. Head of Strategy Deeana Ahmed acknowledged the company’s financial challenges and laid out a clear-eyed view of the tough road ahead.

Any would-be U.S. battery manufacturer has to confront the fact that imported cells and packs from China are far cheaper than anything made in the U.S., even with the current 25 percent tariff. Battery prices were higher when Congress drafted the IRA incentives, but since then, Ahmed told me, China’s battery industry has dumped product into the global market in what she considers an unsustainable effort to depress prices and smother emerging battery factories in the U.S. (Solar panel makers complain of a similar dynamic in their market.)

“Right now, what we’re seeing with the IRA is that it barely is enough to keep us competitive,” Ahmed said. ​“I was meeting with an investor recently, and they asked this question: ​‘What happens if the IRA goes away?’ And it’s like, this is not feasible.”

Our Next Energy has already ordered machinery for its first gigawatt-hour-scale production line, which will make cells for stationary grid storage. But the real prize will be landing a large-scale EV supply contract, which would help secure financing for the full $1.6 billion factory expansion that the company has advertised (and which landed a $200 million grant from the state of Michigan, based on a forecast of creating 2,000 jobs). That would fill out the building I saw with 7 gigawatt-hours of annual production, using machines 25 times larger than the ones I saw, plus another 13 gigawatt-hours somewhere even larger.

“You have to spend $1 billion to $2 billion, minimum, to have a scale that is competitive,” Ahmed said. ​“Anything below that, you’re just losing money.”

If that investment comes through, Our Next Energy will offer entry-level jobs paying $20 to $35 per hour. The company’s preliminary workforce hasn’t unionized, Ahmed said, but ​“we respect the right of our workers to collectively bargain.”

Two years after the IRA passed, it’s still too early to see Our Next Energy in the full swing of domestic battery production. The factory holds great promise but lingers in a vulnerable, incomplete state, a dynamic that characterizes much of Michigan’s clean energy manufacturing buildout. Ford is still constructing its $2.5 billion BlueOval Battery Park in Calhoun County, to employ 1,700 workers, while GM builds a $2.6 billion battery plant in Lansing. Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese battery company, has received regulatory approval to build a $2.4 billion facility in western Michigan, which would employ more than 2,300 people. Gotion had to go to court to defend the project after a new slate of local leaders tried to block it based on the company’s ties to China. 

Concerted state and federal policies have produced this flurry of factory commitments, but few of those 22,000 promised jobs have materialized yet. Market conditions are daunting, even with full-throated federal support; if that support wavers, the whole endeavor might crumble.

Ford pumps the brakes on EVs

In between factory tours, I stopped in at the Detroit Institute of Arts to see the famous Diego Rivera mural of the Rouge plant’s Depression-era V8 production. Henry Ford’s son Edsel Ford commissioned the stirring work in 1932 — a scion of American capitalism partnering with a prominent Mexican communist. 

In one panel, Henry Ford instructs engineers on the newly designed V8, an engine so powerful that he named the new car model after it. (Ford received letters from notorious bank robbers Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger thanking him for designing such a capable getaway vehicle, though some specialists doubt their veracity.) The museum docent told me that Rivera casts the formidable new engine in the guise of a pre-Columbian dog sculpture, with Ford as the high priest interpreting it for his flock. 

Elsewhere in the soaring atrium, furnaces glow like volcanoes while muscular men of various races heave mighty engines onto carts and assemble the cars with freshly stamped chassis, radiators, and tires. 

Now Ford is attempting to reconjure this legendary alchemy of invention and productivity for the electric era. The company has electrified two of its most iconic brands: the Mustang, which transformed from muscle car to nearly silent electric crossover SUV, and America’s best-selling pickup truck, the F-150, now available as the Lightning.

But, even with unprecedented state and federal support, Detroit’s automakers are having trouble recapturing the innovative breakthroughs that put them on the map a century ago.

The problem is, Ford hasn’t yet achieved its own century-old standard of a better car at a cheaper price. The cost of a Lightning can easily hit $90,000 with add-ons. Even at these exorbitant prices, Ford’s electric division lost $1.3 billion to earn $100 million in revenue during the first quarter this year. And it only sold 10,000 vehicles. Expenses will naturally be higher at the beginning of the clean energy buildout, but that’s not a sustainable way of doing business.

I had hoped to see how those electric pickups were made, to view the synthesis of American muscle and quiet efficiency. As it happened, my August visit to Michigan coincided with the Lightning factory’s regular summer shutdown to retool equipment for the fall production season, Ford representatives told me. That same week, Ford announced it had canceled its next EV release because it couldn’t make the economics work for a three-row electric SUV.

Ford Chief Financial Officer John Lawler told the Financial Times, ​“These vehicles need to be profitable, and if they’re not profitable based on where the customer is and the market is, we will … make those tough decisions.” Henry Ford’s genius was to imagine new and better possibilities beyond what customers and the market could imagine; his present-day successors seem unwilling to push those boundaries. 

Ford’s peers in Detroit’s Big Three have even less to show for their EV efforts. GM built the popular Bolt, which sold well at accessible prices, but recalled thousands of them to replace batteries, then abruptly discontinued the model. (GM later changed course, un-canceling the cancellation, but the Bolt still isn’t back in production.) GM’s current EV lineup swings hard into luxury, with Cadillacs and Hummers; its most affordable model is the recently released Chevy Equinox, starting at $33,600. Stellantis, corporate parent of Chrysler, only got around to introducing its first all-electric model in North America this year despite claiming that EVs will comprise half its sales by 2030.

The auto industry’s halting progress notwithstanding, the Whitmer administration has thrown its full-throttled support behind the shift to electric mobility.

Whitmer’s Healthy Climate Plan calls for 2 million EVs on the roads by 2030, served by 100,000 public charging ports (up from around 3,000 in the state today), said Justine Johnson, the former Ford mobility strategist who now helms the state’s new Office for Future Mobility and Electrification. The state government will transition all light-duty vehicles in its fleet to electric by 2033 followed by medium- and heavy-duty vehicles by 2040. 

Over the long term, though, the transition to clean vehicles will require dialing back production of automakers’ highly profitable gas-powered trucks and SUVs, and that will scramble the employment landscape in Detroit. 

For the Whitmer team, the multi-decade planning horizon for the transition to electric mobility offers more time to prepare and manage the economic transition than, say, the sudden shocks of the Great Recession or the dot-com bubble bursting. The Big Three automakers responded to those crises with mass layoffs and cutbacks on benefits for remaining workers. In contrast, the EV transition can be one that Michigan workers and communities plan for and truly benefit from, Smith said.

“Nobody’s talking about phasing out ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles in the next year or two,” he added. ​“We’re going to continue to have a lot of stability in our auto sector in Michigan in the years to come.”

Some researchers have concluded that this shift will ultimately reduce the number of jobs in the sector, because EV drivetrains are more streamlined and less labor-intensive than ICE engine fabrication. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University recently analyzed all the steps and labor hours required to make electric and gas-powered vehicles and concluded that EVs can result in greater labor demand if you include the work of battery production. The latest data, published in March, seems to corroborate Whitmer’s theory that EVs can result in economic gains for Michigan, though the location of the battery factories will influence legacy autoworkers’ ability to transition. 

Michigan is building more than EVs 

Michigan’s battery and EV bets still look unsteady, but the state’s portfolio of new factory investments stretches well beyond the automotive sector. 

In a different boxy building not far from Our Next Energy, I met Jose Nunez-Regueiro, the chief technology officer of Nxlite, a startup that has developed a novel way to make windows significantly more energy-efficient. Out on the factory floor, he opened up a porthole into a large metal chamber: A glowing pink haze filled the space, with twin lines of pulsing lavender tracking along two pipes at the top. 

Nunez-Reguiero explained the pipes are hollow tubes of silver stuffed with magnetic filling. The machine ignites argon, oxygen, or nitrogen under intense pressure, turning it into cosmic pink plasma, which then collides with the magnets. That impact dislodges a plume of atoms, which sputter down onto a panel of glass at a thickness of 10 to 40 nanometers — a technique known as physical vapor deposition.

The transparent, ultra-thin coating blocks select infrared wavelengths, keeping heat out of a building or vehicle in the summer, or keeping it in during the winter. Upgrading windows this way could cut a house’s energy use by 40 percent, Nunez-Reguiero said. Better energy efficiency is an essential component of decarbonizing home heating and cooling, a major goal of both the Michigan climate plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Nxlite had the good fortune to move into a fully built and equipped glass factory. Like Our Next Energy, the startup is running pilot operations now before scaling up to full commercial production.

Over in Litchfield, about 100 miles west of Detroit, Whitmer had celebrated the early August opening of LuxWall, which fabricates gas-insulated window panes, another tool for decreasing building energy consumption. The company called this factory ​“the world’s first high-volume vacuum-insulating glass production facilities,” and announced plans to invest far more money in growing its operations in Michigan. LuxWall employs 87 people now but plans to eventually employ 450, aided by $6 million in state grants and over $31 million in federal money.

And last year, Michigan leaders were proud to close a $400 million factory commitment from Nel, a Norwegian company that makes high-tech electrolyzers for turning clean electricity into hydrogen. Electrolyzers could soon become the picks and shovels of the clean hydrogen gold rush, which promises to decarbonize tricky sectors like long-distance shipping and freight, steelmaking, and chemicals. 

Michigan leaders hustled to make it happen. ​“It came down to two states — I’m not going to name the second state, but the governor of the second state said, ​‘Hey, I’m too busy,’” Quentin Messer, CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, recounted from his office in Lansing. ​“And Gov. Whitmer said, ​‘Look, this is an opportunity. This is my responsibility, as leader of the state, to be closer-in-chief.’” 

Whitmer flew out to Oslo herself and sealed the deal. Messer said it ended up being the largest foreign direct investment announced at the 2023 SelectUSA Investment Summit, the Department of Commerce’s annual conference to facilitate foreign investment in the U.S. economy.

That factory, though, hasn’t broken ground yet — one of many projects held up until the Internal Revenue Service decides how to structure its hydrogen tax credits. 

Other manufacturers have operated in Michigan’s industrial landscape for decades, but added new lines in response to new federal and state incentives. Up in Saginaw, Hemlock Semiconductor has for years produced among the highest-grade polysilicon in the country. After Congress passed policies to encourage onshoring of microchip production and the solar supply chain, Hemlock broke ground on a $375 million expansion in October 2022.

Armstrong International​’s history in the state dates back even further than Hemlock’s. In 1900, Adam Armstrong answered a newspaper ad offering free land and a building in Three Rivers, a farm town nestled among the cornfields south of Kalamazoo, to any company that could hire 15 people over five years. He relocated his machine shop from Chicago, and got to work in a 40-by-100-foot building crafting bicycle spokes, potato diggers, and railroad repair buggies. His great-great-grandson, Kurt Armstrong, told me the company no longer makes potato diggers, but the inverted bucket steam trap it commercialized in 1911 kicked off a thriving business in industrial thermal equipment that now spans 20 factories and offices worldwide.

Armstrong recently started construction on a 29,000-square-foot expansion in Three Rivers to produce industrial-grade heat pumps within 12 months, funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy. The company’s design captures heat in industrial facilities that would otherwise escape as waste, and concentrates it to recirculate into factory processes. It plays in the range of 150 to 200 degrees Celsius, assisting tasks like drying out pet food, distilling bourbon, pasteurizing soft drinks, and operating commercial-scale laundries.

Armstrong said the factory addition will employ 10 to 15 people to start, and that could grow based on demand.

“The reason why we stayed in that Michigan location is because there’s such a deep tie-in to the culture and community there,” Armstrong told me. ​“It’s the employees who make the company great, and you can’t just recreate that somewhere else.”

Armstrong’s expansion is a lot smaller than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory, but it’s bigger than a multi-billion-dollar battery factory that doesn’t yet exist. Michigan’s big-ticket factory commitments drive up the counts of dollars invested and jobs created, but they also require more diligence and risk assessment from their corporate backers, not to mention longer construction times. Meanwhile, the smaller-dollar expansions are putting people to work building tools most people have never heard of, but which serve the climate transition in tangible ways.

Michigan Democrats surge ahead of crucial election

Michigan’s clean energy factories are slowly materializing, but the best is yet to come — assuming the underlying policies to support battery and solar manufacturing remain in effect. Michiganders are uniquely positioned to influence that outcome, by voting in a crucial swing state this November.

One of the big questions facing Democrats broadly in 2024 is whether their efforts to reinvigorate American industry will resonate with voters concerned about the nation’s economic outlook. When Joe Biden was the candidate, swing-state voters weren’t swayed. But the arrival of Harris on the ticket turned states that looked all but lost into toss-ups again. That creates room for a clean energy message to make a difference: Persuading tens of thousands of voters to support a domestic economic platform is more doable than swaying millions.

Measuring voters’ receptiveness to clean energy onshoring is tough to do, especially when, as in Michigan, the most exciting factories aren’t yet boosting local tax revenues and putting thousands of people to work in high-tech jobs. I wasn’t able to find a northern analogue to Dalton, Georgia, where an existing Qcells solar-panel factory used IRA incentives to rapidly grow to 2,000 full-time workers, and the benefits are already cascading across the city.

But Michigan brings two things to the effort that are hard to find together in the other states leading the factory boom: a fired-up state Democratic establishment that’s running on climate action and related jobs, and a newly galvanized union base.

Many of the top winners in clean energy manufacturing dollars have been states led by Republican governors or legislatures, who like the jobs but not the Democrats’ broader policy agenda — places like Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Ohio. 

Michigan, on the other hand, has a deep bench of liberal state leaders who ran on climate last cycle and won a historic majority.

“The governor had talked about it quite a bit before the election, and had worked with people across the state to develop the Michigan climate action plan,” state Senator Sue Shink, a Democrat from the Ann Arbor area, told Canary Media. ​“It had all the policies we [ultimately] enacted laid out in it, and talked about pathways to attaining those goals.”

After winning the statehouse, Whitmer and her allies passed a series of high-profile climate policies last year. Michigan committed to produce carbon-free electricity not by 2045, like California and New York, but by 2040. Other laws added labor standards and energy-justice provisions to the clean energy buildout, and created a Community and Worker Economic Transition Office to look out for the workforce amid the shifts to lower-carbon industry.

Knocking on doors for the 2022 election, Shink found that climate and clean energy were on voters’ minds. Weather fluctuations had messed with farmers’ planting schedules. Huge rainstorms had overwhelmed aging infrastructure and flooded homes. The 100-year-old Edenville Dam burst in May 2020. Diminished snowfall had been curtailing the cherished ski season. 

While seeking to address carbon emissions, the politicians kept their focus on ​“making sure the quality of life in Michigan is as good as it can be,” Shink said.

Residents in her district, for instance, struggled with under-insulated homes, which drive up heating and cooling bills. The state laws created programs to take advantage of federal weatherization funds from the IRA, and ​“it’s making a huge difference in their lives, because they’re warmer, their house is more comfortable,” Shink said. This approach tracks neatly with how progressive data crunchers have advised Democrats to describe the massive and complex Inflation Reduction Act to voters.

Now Michigan Democrats have a package of legislative achievements to run on in November, which happens to complement the principal policy achievements of Harris’ vice presidency. In fact, Michigan politicians are pushing the Harris campaign to speak up more on the domestic manufacturing push, which Biden prioritized in his campaigning, per a recent Politico article. (Neither the Harris campaign nor the Trump campaign responded to Canary Media’s requests for comment for this article.) 

Michigan also has another ascendant political force at work: unions.

Much of the country’s recent EV and battery factory investment has gone to Southeastern states, which attract companies with their ​“business-friendly environment” that includes decades of undercutting the power of organized labor. But unions have played a defining role in Detroit since Henry Ford, after some convincing, recognized the United Auto Workers in 1941. 

Democratic state officials are vocally supportive of Michigan’s union heritage.

“We benefit a lot from the fact that we’ve had the UAW, IBEW, and others investing in workforce and helping with workforce training,” said Smith from the state Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. ​“I think most employers recognize that’s an asset to them and an asset to the state, not necessarily something that’s going to be a threat to their business model.”

Shawn Fain won the presidency of the UAW last year by running as a reform candidate who wanted to clean up after a string of corruption scandals took down leaders of the union’s long-reigning faction. He proceeded to rally the biggest autoworker strike in decades, and win concessions from the Big Three, including a clear pathway for workers to unionize at battery plants. The UAW has since organized workers at two Ultium battery plants, in Lordstown, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, winning wage increases and other benefits.

Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to appear on a picket line last year when he joined Fain at a GM plant near Detroit. Fain later appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August and rallied behind Harris, countering Trump’s recent outreach to working-class voters by labeling him a ​“scab.”

If winning begets more winning, the political mobilization that’s starting to generate clean energy jobs in Michigan will be an asset for Democrats at the polls in November, something that wasn’t there in 2016 or 2020. If these forces keep Michigan in the Democratic column, that could help ensure the clean industrial policies stay on the books in Washington, giving Michigan’s factories more time to overcome headwinds and deliver on their promises of jobs and community revitalization.

Michigan bets on EVs to revive its economy — and hopes jobs will follow is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

DALTON, Ga. — Growing up in Cartersville, Georgia, Lisa Nash saw what happens to communities when factory jobs disappear. It was the 1980s and corporations were offshoring production to reduce costs and raise profits. The jobs that remained in this northwest corner of the state were typically lower-paying ones that didn’t offer the same ladder to the middle class.

“My parents and grandparents were in manufacturing, and they were the ones saying, ​‘Don’t do it,’” Nash recalled.

Nash disregarded their advice, embarking instead on a long career in manufacturing — first in textiles, followed by stints in aviation, automotive, and steel. Now she’s helping to bring higher-tech, higher-paying factory work back to the corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga. 

Nash is the general manager of the Qcells solar panel factory in Dalton, a town of 34,000 located 50 miles up I-75 from her hometown. It opened in January 2019, after the Trump administration imposed a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese-made panels. The Korean conglomerate Hanwha owns Qcells, and initially planned to hire several hundred people at the site, Nash told me on a recent visit to the factory. By the end of 2019, it employed more than 800. 

Then, in 2020, Georgia helped elect President Joe Biden and sent two Democrats to the Senate, clinching a thin majority. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock got to work crafting detailed policies to promote domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies, which China had dominated for years; they wanted solar panels and batteries made in America — specifically Georgia — instead of in China, a geopolitical rival.

Those measures made it into the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August 2022 — two years ago this week. The legislation created the nation’s first comprehensive policies to support domestic clean energy manufacturing. Qcells broke ground on a second facility in Dalton in February 2023. Completed that August, the expansion added two football fields’ worth of manufacturing space with four new production lines — which produce 1.5 times more solar panels than the original three lines, thanks to technological advances. Now the whole complex employs 2,000 people full time and makes 5.1 gigawatts of solar panels a year, more than any other site in the U.S.

Politicians have been promising for decades to retrain American workers and revive long-lost manufacturing, with little to show for it. Now, though, the U.S. has entered a new era on trade: Leaders of both parties have rejected the long-standing free-trade consensus and its penchant for offshoring jobs. Biden married that reshoring impulse with a desire to boost clean energy production, to both stimulate the economy and fight climate change. 

This grand experiment remains in its infancy, and the success of the clean energy manufacturing revolution is by no means guaranteed. Cheap imports could outcompete even newly subsidized American products. 

And if Republicans win the presidency and retake Congress, they’ve threatened to stop subsidizing low-carbon energy resources and instead double down on fossil fuel production. House Republicans — including Dalton’s representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have voted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to repeal the domestic manufacturing incentives in the IRA. (Greene’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“Donald Trump and his Republican allies promised to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he’s reelected, so there’s a lot at stake here,” Representative Nikema Williams, who leads the Georgia Democrats, told me.

Since the IRA passed, Georgia has received $23 billion in clean energy factory investment, much of it flowing to northwest Georgia. I wanted to see what impact this is having on communities formerly hit hard by industrial decline, so I followed the money trail to Dalton earlier this summer. 

I found a population that seems to like having advanced solar manufacturing in their backyard. Dalton’s solar jobs are boosting wages, invigorating the historic town center, and employing local high school graduates. Those benefits are starting to spread to nearby communities, where new solar factories are springing to life. In November, voters will weigh two very different visions of America’s energy future on the ballot, but Dalton is already reaping the rewards from slotting solar into its storied history of industrial production.

From carpets to solar

Both CSX and Norfolk Southern run Class I rail lines through Dalton, a testament to its industrial legacy, and freight trains bellow day and night.

That legacy harks back to 1900, according to local historians, when Catherine Evans Whitener sold a hand-tufted bedspread from her front porch for $2.50. The cottage industry took off in this land of forested ridges and stream-crossed valleys, and over time, local factories consolidated into global carpeting giants Shaw Industries and Mohawk Industries.

“The carpet industry was born here,” Carl Campbell, executive director of economic development at the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce, told me when I visited the Chamber. The New Georgia Encyclopedia states that 80 percent of America’s tufted carpet production happens within 100 miles of Dalton.

The conference room where we spoke sported large-format aerial photographs of the major factories nearby: the largest Shaw site, 650,000 square feet; and the new Engineered Floors colossus, 2.8 million square feet. 

“You feel like there’s enough carpet in that building to cover the whole world,” said Campbell, who grew up in Dalton. 

Dalton employment numbers peaked at 80,200 in 2006, per the Chattanooga Times Free Press. But the Great Recession crushed the homebuilding industry, cratering demand for Dalton’s carpeting products. 

Dalton ​“was a ghost town in 2011, nothing going on because everybody was hurting,” Campbell added. From June 2011 to June 2012, Dalton notched the dubious distinction of most jobs lost of all 372 metro areas surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By that point, one-quarter of Dalton’s pre-recession jobs had vanished, and unemployment surged to 12.3 percent. 

Since then, the industry has recovered somewhat. Engineered Floors, Mohawk, and Shaw still dominate local employment, with some 14,000 jobs among them, Campbell said. Those companies have had to adapt to evolving consumer tastes, shifting from wall-to-wall carpets to hardwood and other flooring materials. They’ve also automated aspects of production, reducing the number of workers needed.

In the wake of the Great Recession, local leaders sought to diversify Dalton’s industry. The county acquired an undeveloped lot south of town, and Campbell later pushed to clear and level the site, so it was shovel-ready for some future tenant. When Trump’s solar tariffs kicked in, Campbell’s counterparts at Georgia’s Department of Economic Development sent Qcells his way. 

Qcells showed up in February 2018, looking to spin up its first American solar-panel factory in less than a year. ​“Suddenly, we had exactly what they needed,” Campbell said.

Thus Dalton managed to bring in new industry to balance out its base of carpets and flooring. Qcells originally promised to invest $130 million and hire 525 people within five years, Campbell said. 

“They did it in three months,” he added. ​“In terms of an economic development project, they check all the boxes: Everything they said they would do, they did it faster than they said they would do it.”

Domestic solar manufacturing, by humans and robots

When I asked folks around town what they thought of Qcells, they kept mentioning the dozens of air-conditioning units arrayed on the factory roof, like a field of doghouses, easily visible from I-75. I later learned that Qcells brought in helicopters to install those units, which made for a bit of small-town spectacle. Still, it struck me as a surprising detail to dwell on for a business that somehow turns the sun’s rays into cheap, emissions-free electricity. 

Once I crossed Qcells’ sizzling parking lot and stepped indoors, it started to make sense. Georgia gets hot, and carpet factories get hot, but the vast floors of the twin solar factories are quite literally cool places to work. 

The climate control is not unique to assembling solar panels, but it is required for the sensitive, precisely calibrated product. The air conditioners are but one sign that high-tech manufacturing has arrived, and that it makes for pretty comfortable work.

I met my two tour guides, Wayne Lock and Alan Rodriguez, in the factory lobby, and they quickly confirmed the physical appeal of Qcells jobs. Lock, now a quality engineer at Qcells, previously worked in carpet manufacturing; he had to wear special heat-resistant gear to handle carpeting materials that would otherwise deliver third-degree burns. Rodriguez, an engineering supervisor at Qcells, used to apply the coating material underneath carpets.

“You’re sandwiched between the steamer and the oven, so it gets quite hot,” Rodriguez told me. Attending to those machines exposed him to temperatures that could exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Even more than Qcells’ air conditioning, though, people I spoke to kept bringing up the pay.

By offering more for zero-skill, entry-level positions than the other factories in town, Qcells started attracting workers and pushed up wages across Dalton, Campbell said: ​“Competition brings everybody, so everybody’s had to kind of equalize to keep employees.” 

Now Qcells hourly wages for non-experienced hires start at $17.50 to $22 — that amounts to $36,400 to $45,760 a year for full-time work. Workers with experience in robotics and manufacturing can take home much more than that. Employees can raise their pay through a variety of on-the-job training, most of which involves handling and troubleshooting the in-house fleet of robots.

Lock, Rodriguez, and I walked into the newest factory, past meeting rooms with names like Naboo and Mandalore, Star Wars locales where quirky robots coexist with all manner of creatures. As we strolled across the floor, squat wheeled autonomous vehicles rolled past us down pathways marked by tape on the smooth floor, ferrying bales of materials or hauling out hulking boxes of finished panels.

“We try to stay out of their way, and if we don’t, they yell at us,” said Lock. ​“It’s fun.”

As we stood talking, I noticed that one such robo-buggy was waiting for us to move. Barely discernible over the background drone of machines, a female voice intoned, ​“Robot is moving. Please look out.” When humans hold up more time-sensitive deliveries, Lock explained, the voice switches to male and gets louder. 

Other robots remain fixed in place, carrying out repetitive precision tasks. I stared, mesmerized, at one machine that split wafer-thin silicon cells in half, first scoring them with a laser, then slicing them with a concentrated jet of water. A taller machine grabbed nearly 8-foot metal frames and sliced them through the air like a master swordsman in a Kurosawa film, to slot them around glassed-in silicon panels. 

Throughout the process, cameras scan cells and use artificial intelligence to shunt defective items off the line for manual correction. 

In the 2019-era factory next door, humans carry out many of these tasks. Lock, though, didn’t see the robots as competitors — he said they were taking on more physically demanding jobs so the humans could step into higher-skilled roles tending to robots.

“The ergonomics are better for you,” he said, and the new lines are more productive. 

Hiring local, spending local

When Qcells was first staffing up, it relied on Quick Start, a Georgia state program that funds worker training for new factories before they open — a major draw for executives deciding where to locate their factories.

Qcells still recruits to meet ongoing staffing needs, and it has been paying special attention to high schoolers who are graduating and looking for employment. Nash speaks passionately about Qcells’ recruitment efforts; she’s seen the civic fallout from decades when local families encouraged kids to avoid manufacturing.

“Small communities cannot thrive with kids graduating and leaving those communities to live elsewhere, to get high-paying technical jobs,” Nash said. ​“That’s what’s happening across the country. Bringing manufacturing back, and bringing highly automated manufacturing, is offering job opportunities where now these students are staying here.”

Some 56 percent of Dalton-area students enroll in postsecondary education within 16 months of graduating high school, said Stephani Womack, director of education and workforce development for the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce. For the remainder, the chamber wants to make sure family-supporting jobs are available.

For two weeks in June, Womack helped run Project Purpose, a crash course in how to start and navigate careers that pay living wages. Recent high school graduates prepped for interviews, shopped for professional clothes, and toured housing options and downtown hotspots — the kinds of places they could frequent once they join the workforce. 

But the centerpiece of the program amounted to professional speed dating, as Dalton’s major employers offered tours and entry-level jobs. Last year, Dalton’s first time running Project Purpose, seven young adults completed the program, and Qcells hired one of them. This time, 18 finished, and Qcells hired 12 of them to start on July 1.

“Next year, we hope to double that, or more,” Nash said. 

Several participants came in knowing about Qcells, betting that the intensive crash course would increase their odds of landing good roles there, Womack told me over a table at Garmony House, a downtown coffee shop that draws lines for its statuesque strawberry cupcakes and coffee-glazed cinnamon rolls.

“Qcells is providing a diverse set of options for our students who need to go to work but want to stay in our community,” Womack said. ​“They see a climate-controlled facility with entry-level opportunities — that’s exciting for them. … Manufacturing isn’t what it used to be.”

For younger people to stay in town and build a life, Dalton needs more housing, and now it’s getting its first large apartment complex in over two decades, Campbell said. In total, 900 apartment units are slated to come online from last August through this November — not enough to catch up on a long-running housing deficit, but a step in the right direction.

That renewed real estate activity is reflected in downtown Dalton’s bustling core. 

Locals pack the booths at the Oakwood Cafe, perhaps the only place in America that sells a platter of egg, sausage, toast, and grits for just $3.65. Multiple microbreweries beckon, as does a plush cocktail bar, the Gallant Goat, which stocks fresh mint by the fistful to garnish its drinks. Down the road, diners can sample ceviche of shrimp shipped in from coastal Mexico, succulent chicken wings, and high-end Southern cuisine. 

This spring, the plush Carpentry Hotel opened across from the Oakwood Cafe, decked out with vibrant textile art to commemorate the town’s carpeting heritage.

“That’s been big for us, getting that hotel in downtown. That’s indicative of a robust local economy that people are coming to participate in,” local real estate agent Beau Patton told me as the late afternoon sun streamed into the Gallant Goat. Patton works with Qcells employees who want to buy homes in the area. He sees the factory’s decision to locate there as ​“very mutually beneficial” for Qcells and Whitfield County: ​“What you hope is Whitfield County grows with it, and it grows with Whitfield County.” 

From Dalton to towns across Georgia

Dalton got in early on the national clean-energy factory revival, and has already seen its solar factory push up wages, enable high school graduates to stay and start careers, and inject money into a reinvigorated downtown. Many more communities in Georgia are following close behind with their own cleantech factories, seeking a similar economic jolt.

“There is a palpable and intense sense of excitement across the state about how these manufacturing and infrastructure policies are supercharging Georgia’s economic development,” said Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat who authored the IRA manufacturing incentives that Qcells is tapping into. ​“And I would add, it’s not just the primary industrial facilities; it’s all of the secondary and tertiary suppliers and vendors and service companies and the financial services firms needed to support them.”

Qcells is building an even bigger factory compound down in Cartersville, which won a conditional $1.45 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy on August 8. This facility will take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits to onshore more steps of the solar supply chain: slicing silicon wafers, carving them into solar cells, and assembling finished modules with even newer robots than the ones I saw in Dalton. Until now, those high-value precursors to solar panels were shipped in from overseas. Workers in Dalton complete just the last step: assembling modules. Cartersville promises to bring the dream of American-made solar a bit closer to reality.

To achieve that dream, the industry has a few other challenges to confront. For one, 97 percent of the glass that encloses solar panels comes from China. Besides the geopolitical implications of that dependence, glass is so fragile and heavy that its shipping costs make domestic production enticing both economically and environmentally. 

“We need domestic glass to have an efficient supply chain,” said Suvi Sharma, founder and CEO of solar recycling startup Solarcycle. His company is breaking ground on a combination solar-panel recycling facility and solar-glass factory in Cedartown, some 70 miles southwest of Dalton. Sharma expects to invest $344 million in the community and hire 600 full-time employees.

Compared with Dalton and Cartersville, ​“Cedartown is more off the beaten path — this would be the first large-scale factory going up there,” said Sharma. After years in which the population declined and young people looked elsewhere for jobs, ​“this enables them to keep people and bring in more people. There’s a cascading impact.”

Solarcycle will use its rail spur to ship in low-iron silica from a mine in Georgia, plus soda ash and limestone. Over time, it will supplement those raw ingredients with increasing amounts of glass the company will pull from decommissioned solar panels, including those made by Qcells. The goal is to produce enough glass for 5 gigawatts of panels per year; Solarcycle will ship the glass to nearby customers. At that point, workers in northwest Georgia will have a hand in all the major steps of solar-module production except the processing of raw polysilicon. Hanwha recently became the largest shareholder in REC Silicon to secure access to domestic polysilicon from the Pacific Northwest. 

Georgia also nabbed a hefty chunk of the electric-vehicle factory buildout catalyzed by IRA incentives. Hyundai is dropping nearly $1 billion on its ​“Metaplant” near the deepwater port of Savannah and building an adjacent $4.3 billion battery plant with LG. Kia erected a new EV9 SUV manufacturing line at its plant in West Point, about halfway down Georgia’s border with Alabama. The first EV9 rolled off the line in June — less than two years after the IRA was signed into law.

Dalton, then, is a leading indicator of the industrial invigoration that clean energy factories are bringing to cities and towns across Georgia. People broadly appreciate it — if not for the role in combating climate change or countering China’s industrial might, then for high starting wages, comfortable working conditions, and opportunities for advancement. 

But for this nascent factory boom to endure, the policies that triggered it need to stay in effect. The people of Georgia played a decisive role in spurring this manufacturing revival; this November, they’ll have an outsize role in deciding if it continues.

How Dalton, Georgia, went from Carpet Capital to Solartown, USA is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.