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. 

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.

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.

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.

When I was growing up, during the Clinton and Bush presidencies, American manufacturing was on the wane.

The bipartisan Washington consensus accepted the steady outflow of American jobs to other countries in the name of abstract economic theories. If your town lost its anchor factory and fell apart, well, that was too bad, but at least the unemployed workers could buy marginally cheaper consumer goods. 

My father resisted this thinking, and when buying something, tried to track down a version that was still made in the U.S., whether it be a baking pan, umbrella, or some other implement. The quest seemed to grow harder as time went on — a perhaps quixotic response to a world moving in one direction.

Now the world’s turning back the other way, at least for strategic technologies. The party of Reagan has become the party of tariffs, and Democrats have embraced industrial policy after a multi-decade hiatus. The infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act, both of which had bipartisan support, provided money and policy to kick off the onshoring, while the Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed with only Democratic votes, accelerated the trend for the clean energy industry, which happened to be surging through record growth at the exact moment American politicians were looking to revive domestic manufacturing.

How are these new political and economic tailwinds reshaping towns and cities across America? This is an especially salient question in swing states, where voters will exercise outsized influence on whether these Biden-era policies continue. So I hit the road this summer to look for answers.

I spent a week in bucolic Dalton, Georgia, the historic carpet-making town represented in the U.S. House by Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene, which now hosts the single largest solar-panel factory in the country. I drove around Greater Detroit in search of the electrified future of auto manufacturing, and learned about new factories making energy-efficient windows and industrial heat pumps. In Pennsylvania, I saw abandoned steel factories revived to make advanced batteries or steel for solar plants.

Here’s what I learned along the way.

Yes, the clean energy manufacturing boom is underway

Over the past several decades, the cleantech industry in the U.S. has been running on imports. The few companies that managed to make solar panels or batteries here were the exceptions that proved the rule. When those holdouts periodically asked for more trade protections, the bulk of the industry shouted them down, to maintain access to cheaper equipment.

The Inflation Reduction Act changed that.

Enough new solar panel factories have opened to nearly meet our national appetite for this product (if they all operate at full capacity, which isn’t guaranteed). That’s a speedy reversal of fortune for the U.S. solar industry, but panel assembly is also the easiest step in the solar supply chain to spin up. Now, a select few companies are pushing further, to make the higher-value silicon wafers and cells that go into the panels. The battery factory buildout is taking more time and money, but major operations have opened and many more are on their way in the Rust Belt and the Southeast. 

The plants I visited share several key traits: They’re new, they’re spotless, and they feature a lot of robots. The human workers troubleshoot when the robots get confused. The automation helps the factories put out more volume, which is crucial for catching up to the massive factories overseas that are already operating at scale. And it makes for higher-paying work than more manual jobs at less advanced facilities. 

The clean energy manufacturing boom has barely gotten started

Despite all the early progress, the vast majority of factories announced since the IRA passed have yet to break ground. Some companies have secured empty plots of land and are still drawing up plans. In many cases, even though the press release went out, the would-be manufacturers haven’t made the final investment decision, as they watch market conditions or wait for the IRS to finalize a key IRA tax credit. 

Take Michigan: Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has bet big that the shift to electric vehicles will turn out net-positive for the state’s manufacturing-heavy economy, which suffered with industry shifts like globalization and automation. But for those numbers to add up, the state needs to open major battery factories to make up for the loss of internal-combustion-engine jobs.

This battery factory buildout is happening, but it’s not putting many workers on the line yet. Ford is building a $2.5 billion factory, GM is building a $2.6 billion factory, and the U.S. subsidiary of Chinese company Gotion is trying to break ground on a $2.4 billion project in northwestern Michigan. 

I was able to tour only one post-IRA lithium-ion battery factory: startup Our Next Energy’s facility, west of Detroit. On the day of my visit, a surprisingly small number of cars occupied the parking lot of the hulking, 660,000-square-foot facility. Turns out, only a pilot line was operating in one corner of the building, where a handful of technicians made small volumes of test cells to send to prospective customers. The startup has a grand vision for an American battery renaissance, but it needs a major EV-battery order to get the financing and fill out the rest of the factory. In the meantime, Our Next Energy has struggled financially, leading to the demotion of the founder-CEO and layoffs for workers.

In Pennsylvania, the clean energy industrial revival is even more nascent. I visited only three operating factories — those run by JM Steel, which is making torque tubes for Nextracker’s solar trackers; Eos, an unusual zinc battery operation; and Form Energy, which has a brand-new iron-air battery factory across the border in West Virginia but is drawing workers from metro Pittsburgh.

The steel site employs more than 50 people and the battery factories approximately 300 each. Those are significant numbers, and all the jobs pay far more than minimum wage. But these trailblazers don’t come close to employing the thousands that worked in the legacy steel and industrial plants that occupied those lots previously.

Communities are already experiencing the benefits of clean energy manufacturing 

While in the 30,000-person town of Dalton, Georgia, I kept asking locals what they thought of the Qcells solar factory having set up shop in the town known as the ​“Carpet Capital of the World.”

No one mentioned the stuff that gets Beltway insiders and clean energy wonks excited: reversing the decades-long decline of solar production capacity; countering China’s lopsided dominance of cleantech supply chains; distributing the benefits of the clean energy transition across a broader swath of the population to strengthen its popularity.

In the bars and chicken-wing shops and at a Juneteenth barbecue, people wanted to talk about the air conditioning. They knew Qcells as that place with all the air conditioners on the roof, visible from Interstate 75. I later learned that these had been installed by helicopter, which made for a bit of a spectacle. But the reason the story kept resonating is that, well, it gets hot in Georgia, and even hotter in the carpet factories, so going to work in a climate-controlled space like Qcells is a real draw. It also helps that robots do all the heavy lifting, so it’s an ergonomically friendly workplace, too. And it pays better: Local officials I spoke to said the higher wages at the plant had lifted salaries across the county.