Georgia voters could make or break their state’s clean energy jobs boom

Despite widely diverging party platforms, there’s one goal that both Democrats and Republicans currently endorse: bringing manufacturing jobs back to America. That’s already happening, and nowhere more so than in Georgia. The state capitalized early on federal incentives to spur a bustling clean energy industry, and that has created a bundle of contradictions for the state’s politics.

Governor Brian Kemp, a pro-business Republican, has deftly wielded his powers to attract factory investment with state-funded worker training and tax incentives. Under his watch, Georgia developed the nation’s largest solar-panel factory hub, plus a host of billion-dollar battery plants and electric-vehicle factories. Georgia leads the nation in clean energy manufacturing jobs created in the past couple of years, and trails only the auto capital of Michigan in total dollars invested in clean energy factories.

Much of this investment couldn’t have happened without the manufacturing tax credits that President Joe Biden signed into law two years ago. The Inflation Reduction Act was the first serious legislative push to invigorate American production of solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. That watershed legislation, in turn, would not have passed if Georgia had not elected two Democratic senators in 2020. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock spearheaded the portions of the law that award credits for onshoring the clean-energy supply chain, and their constituents have reaped more benefits than just about anyone else.

Now the 2024 election could scramble this bipartisan economic success story. Competing with more established manufacturing bases around the world is tough going, even with supportive tax incentives and tariffs. But Republicans in Congress have already tried to repeal the IRA credits that underpin so much of the factory buildout. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised to undo the ​“Green New Scam,” which, as a made-up term, leaves some room for interpretation over which specific clean energy policies he wants to destroy. Democrats, conversely, are running on preserving their legislative victories and keeping the jobs and investment machine rolling.

Kemp, meanwhile, says he’s trying to help Trump in ​“saving our country from Kamala Harris and the Democrats,” even as Trump attacks him and his family personally and advocates policies that would upend Georgia’s economic momentum. Kemp’s office did not respond to questions in time for publication.

Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes could well decide the presidency, depending on how the other swing states break in November. Biden as an incumbent candidate struggled to connect with Georgia voters over how his policies impacted their lives: He trailed by six points in early July polling averages from The New York Times. Vice President Kamala Harris’ sudden vault into the candidacy has reset the race, and leading election analysts now consider the state a toss-up.

Thus Georgia has become a battleground not just for the presidency, but for the nascent yet fragile revival of American manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Biden pulled ahead there by fewer than 12,000 votes. His policies have helped create 32,000 clean energy manufacturing jobs in the state in the last two years. It’s not yet clear whether the rise of clean energy factories as an economic force will shift voters’ attitudes, but if there’s any place where it could make a difference this fall, it will be Georgia.

Georgia’s recipe for bipartisan success in clean energy manufacturing

Federal policy can’t will a nationwide manufacturing renaissance into being; factories have to go somewhere, and that’s where state and local leaders come in. Georgia demonstrates that enthusiastic state leadership can matter more than the party in power: Plenty of states with liberal leaders and aggressive climate targets have whiffed on attracting clean energy factories, while Georgia cleaned up.

Georgia’s pragmatic bipartisan alliance operates largely behind the scenes, but it is visible in the press releases that companies issue when announcing their factory rollouts. These tend to follow a certain formula: A Kemp quote highlights the local community benefits and praises Georgia’s attractive environment for doing business, followed by a quote from Ossoff or Warnock, or both, calling out the key enabling role played by the federal legislation they helped pass. This choreographed messaging lets each leader describe the same economic outcome in a way that fits their political worldview.

For the senators, the billion-dollar factory spree is the intended effect of leveraging federal policy to supercharge the state’s existing economic strengths.

“Senator Warnock and I helped draft the law to maximally benefit Georgia, and to play to Georgia’s strengths,” Ossoff told Canary Media. ​“We have extraordinary logistics infrastructure in the state, the third-busiest deep-water port in the country, the busiest airport in the world, world-class research institutions, a great technical college system.”

Kemp, meanwhile, can claim convincingly that the state’s business acumen keeps winning new factory deals. Georgians proudly cite their status as the leading state to do business in, according to the magazine Site Selection.

Nevertheless, Kemp’s success at distributing the benefits of factory investment all around the state has led to some counterintuitive political situations.

Conservative firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene represents Georgia’s 14^th Congressional District, which stretches from the outer reaches of Atlanta to the northwest corner of the state. That district contains the flagship Qcells solar panel factory in Dalton, built in a matter of months after Trump instituted solar tariffs, which was then greatly expanded after the IRA passed. This hub, now the most prolific solar panel producer in the country, helped draw the forthcoming Solarcycle facility, which will recycle solar panels and fabricate glass for new ones.

Greene voted against the IRA; her name does not appear with Kemp’s on the announcements of clean energy factories in her own district, something a politician would typically take credit for. But Kemp brought home the bacon for her district nonetheless.

Now Greene is facing off against retired Brigadier General Shawn Harris, who concluded a 40-year military career last year and has been hard at work building a cattle ranch near Cedartown, Georgia, ever since. He’s the latest Democrat to challenge Greene for her seat in the deep red 14^th District — two years ago, Greene won 65 percent of the vote.

Despite party differences, Harris is ready to praise the conservative governor for his ​“excellent” work bringing solar and other advanced industries to the region. In fact, over a coffee in Rome, Georgia, in June, Harris pitched himself as a more effective partner for Kemp and the other state officials on ​“Team Georgia” than Greene, who, he said, ​“votes no on everything.” (Greene’s press team did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“We’re doing what’s best for Georgians, not no red or blue,” he added. ​“And what’s best for Georgians is high-paying generational jobs, like what you and I are talking about today when it comes to Qcells.”

Georgia’s bipartisan support played a big role in attracting Solarcycle to Cedartown, CEO Suvi Sharma told Canary Media. The startup previously built facilities in Odessa, Texas, and Mesa, Arizona.

“The IRA bill and what the Biden administration has put forward on clean energy, that’s monumental, and that’s what really has created the ecosystem for all these factories,” Sharma noted. ​“In Georgia, Governor Kemp and his office were extremely proactive and communicated to us that they wanted us there. As long as people are looking out for what’s best for their communities, it doesn’t matter what side of the political fence they’re on.”

The clean energy factory boom is underway, but fragile

This marriage of the federal legislation passed by Democrats and the business-friendly policies of Republican state officials has meant that Georgia got an early start on the clean energy manufacturing boom that the IRA was intended to spur. New factories have created 32,000 jobs there in the last two years, according to the latest tally by Climate Power. In places like Dalton, residents are already feeling the benefits in the form of higher wages, an expanded local tax base, career opportunities, and civic growth. As factories come online in other states, such as Michigan, Texas, and Arizona, those benefits will continue to spread.

But the success of the last two years remains fragile.

The U.S. has its work cut out if it wants to catch up to the solar and battery manufacturing powerhouses of Asia, which doubled down on the industry in the years when the U.S. let it languish. Complicating things, panels and batteries are low-margin commodities that are always getting squeezed by competition. The IRA’s decade of manufacturing credits was intended to cover the premium for producing them in America in the short term, so the industry can get up and running and bring costs down with scale and experience.

“On the module front, it’s going very well — there’s been huge capacity growth,” said Elissa Pierce, a solar supply-chain analyst at research firm Wood Mackenzie. Before the IRA, the U.S. could produce 8 gigawatts of solar modules or panels; that has more than tripled since the IRA passed, to 30 gigawatts halfway through this year. This production capacity, if fully utilized, approaches the 40 gigawatts of modules Wood Mackenzie expects the U.S. solar market will consume this year. These numbers point to real industrial growth in a very short period of time.

That said, the U.S. has been slower to break into the higher-cost, higher-value steps further up the supply chain: polysilicon, wafers, and cells. Such investments are coming — Qcells is building one of the first new wafer and cell operations in Cartersville, Georgia, at this very moment — but those take longer to spin up than module assembly plants.

The panel makers that have commenced operations aren’t in the clear either. They’re confronting the latest episode of oversupply in the global solar panel market. The U.S. is sitting on some 40 gigawatts of cheap imported panels, Pierce said, depressing prices and forcing the new U.S. factories to sell for less.

“Even with the tax credits, the margins are pretty slim right now for U.S. manufacturers,” Pierce said. ​“If you remove these manufacturing credits, it would definitely be hard for these U.S. manufacturers to remain competitive.”

Batteries are even tougher for manufacturers to compete on, because setting up those factories is more capital-intensive and complex. Reports out of China portend jaw-dropping cost declines, even for a product that has become steadily cheaper over the last decade. That’s great news for battery customers, but disconcerting for anyone who just greenlit a $2 billion factory to try to make batteries in the U.S. for the first time.

In sum, the long-term success of the clean energy manufacturing surge is far from certain even with the 10 years of promised domestic incentives. But those incentives are already on the line with this election.

The election will decide if the factory boom continues 

If Trump and the Republicans win a trifecta in November and proceed to rip up the IRA, the companies that invested in anticipation of 10 years of tax credits would have to figure out how to survive. Investors would likely scrap factories that had been announced but not yet built, to the loss of their host communities. Factories that are already operational may have to pare back or freeze production to assess the damage, smothering the economic boost to their regions. 

In the county where Qcells built its Dalton factory, Trump won 70 percent of the vote in 2020. Elsewhere in Georgia and around the country, much of the factory buildout has gone to areas that supported Trump and elected Republicans to Congress. Trump’s own supporters would disproportionately suffer if he succeeded in undoing the clean manufacturing credits.

Some Republicans are already pushing to avoid that political own goal. In an early August letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, 18 Republican members of Congress argued against disrupting the energy tax credits that businesses have used to justify investment in factories and power plants. ​“A full repeal would create a worst-case scenario where we would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars and received next to nothing in return,” wrote the group, which included Georgia Representative Buddy Carter.

One path to avoid that scenario would be if Republicans pursue an IRA repeal the way they pursued their long-promised repeal of Obamacare: They could fail to achieve the promise and then just stop talking about it. Those 18 letter signers have enough votes to stop a Republican IRA repeal, given today’s slim majority; that dynamic could persist if the election produces a new balance of power in the House. Another path would be pruning politically vulnerable sections of the voluminous legislation to score some wins but letting the economic engine keep humming. Ossoff and other senators recently introduced a measure to block Chinese companies from pocketing IRA solar manufacturing incentives, which could defuse one point of contention.

Then again, Trump promised to get rid of the constitutional right to an abortion, and he delivered that in full. He could well ditch the pruning shears and chop the whole IRA down if he winds up back in office with a sufficiently large legislative majority.

Clean energy advocates and Democratic campaigners in Georgia are working hard to prevent that outcome by increasing awareness about how the factory boom materialized in the first place. The companies building the factories have lots of reasons to stay out of the political fray: maintaining good relations with their governor and senators, making sure they don’t alienate their workforce. But the result has been that even communities that directly feel the benefits of the new factories don’t necessarily know the full story of how they got there.

“When you pass transformational legislation like we did in the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration, there’s a lot of things included in that, so you have to break it down for the voters,” said Nikema Williams, who represents Georgia’s 5^th District in Congress and chairs the Democratic Party of Georgia. ​“I remind people that the Inflation Reduction Act is just a fancy way of saying ​‘We’re lowering your costs and putting more money in your pocket.’”

Harris, the retired brigadier general challenging Greene, agreed that nothing hits home like the raw economic impact of the clean energy factories.

“Clean energy plays just fine, not a problem — but people like the idea of knowing that it’s gonna pay $17.50 an hour,” said Harris, referencing the starting wage at Qcells. “$17.50 an hour is a lot of money in our district.”

Georgia’s minimum wage sits at $5.15 an hour, significantly lower than the federal minimum of $7.25.

Public awareness of the IRA does seem to be growing. A Washington Post poll last summer found that a startling 71 percent of voters said they knew ​“little” or ​“nothing” about it. The ​“heard nothing” response used to rank closer to 50 percent, but ​“now it’s rare for us to see in polling that more than a third of respondents haven’t heard anything at all,” said Grace Adcox, senior climate strategist at progressive polling firm Data for Progress. In May polling, 71 percent of likely voters say they know ​“a little” or ​“a lot” about Biden’s clean energy law.

But there’s still not much evidence to suggest that this increasing awareness will translate into votes for Democrats. Certainly, those particular economic arguments weren’t moving the needle while Biden was at the head of the ticket. Within weeks of Vice President Harris taking over the candidacy, the race has become competitive again. Perhaps voters will respond better to her case that the IRA — which Harris cast the tiebreaking vote for, as president of the Senate — is fueling Georgia’s economic growth and should continue unhindered.

At the very least, the tightening race means that fewer people need to be swayed by the argument for preserving the factory boom in order to make a difference in the outcome of the election.

Retired teacher Bette Holland has been reaching out to voters in Dawson County. Now in her 70s, she directs the North Georgia Conservation Coalition, spreading the word among the foothills of the Appalachian mountains about how residents can save money on energy bills with IRA’s numerous incentives.

“If we’re going to keep these credits and these rebates, we have to continue with a Democratic administration,” she told Canary Media. ​“I feel very confident that if we continue to tell people about the Inflation Reduction Act … that this will change votes.”

In 2020, Democratic organizers ​“worked our tails off” to get just 15 percent of Dawson County to vote for Biden, Holland noted. Most people there and in the other northern Georgia counties are mistrustful of government and ​“aren’t going to listen to anything from Joe Biden.” But climate advocates don’t need to flip such counties to make a difference statewide, she said: ​“You only need to get 4 or 5 percent more than you got last time.”

While activists knock on doors and call likely voters, Georgia’s new factories pump out solar panels and batteries to supply the nation’s energy needs. The state has shown the country what is possible when leaders of both parties take manufacturing seriously. But the buildout so far is just a taste of what could come, if voters send the message that they want it to last.