This story initially appeared on Grist and is a part of the Local weather Desk collaboration.
Seamus Fitzgerald hears numerous opinions about solar energy. Because the affiliate director of actual property at OneEnergy Renewables, a photo voltaic power developer, he approaches farmers and different landowners throughout the Midwest with proposals to lease their properties for photo voltaic initiatives. Some landowners are enthusiastic about being a part of the shift to scrub power. Others are hostile to the thought of placing rows of gleaming panels on their land.
Fitzgerald manages to persuade many farmers by explaining the easy economics of leasing their land for solar energy. “On the finish of the day, the monetary funds from these kinds of initiatives are usually increased than what people can pull off of their floor via different varieties of crops,” he mentioned. To promote solar energy to individuals who might need hesitations, he typically talks about how the expertise was invented in America. “Once you set up a photo voltaic undertaking, you’re accumulating an American useful resource right here in America,” Fitzgerald mentioned.
It echoes the best way that President Donald Trump talks about power, although he’s often heaping reward on American oil and fuel, not renewables. Nonetheless, the Photo voltaic Power Industries Affiliation, the trade’s major lobbying group, has discovered loads of methods to align its work with the administration’s speaking factors. Now splayed throughout its web site, subsequent to a picture of an American flag hovering over photo voltaic panels, is a brand new slogan: “American Power DOMINANCE.” Earlier this month, the affiliation participated in a lobbying blitz in Washington, DC, urging lawmakers to maintain tax credit for clear power initiatives in place.
Photo voltaic supplied nearly 6 % of complete US electrical energy technology final yr, however it’s been rising quick and is anticipated to produce “nearly all development” in electrical energy technology this yr, in response to the pre-Trump Power Data Administration. Many are hoping that the expertise—which is broadly standard amongst People, with 78 % supporting creating extra photo voltaic farms—can handle to remain out of Trump’s tradition wars over local weather change. Extra so than wind energy with its towering generators, photo voltaic power has a capability to bridge ideological divides, interesting to environmentalists and “don’t-tread-on-me” libertarians alike.
“President Trump has particularly mentioned that he loves photo voltaic—and as power demand soars, we all know that photo voltaic is essentially the most environment friendly and reasonably priced manner so as to add numerous power to the grid, quick,” mentioned Abigail Ross Hopper, the Photo voltaic Power Industries Affiliation’s president and CEO, in a press release to Grist.
In December her commerce group launched a coverage highway map that displays Trump’s agenda, with priorities akin to “get rid of dependence on China” and “minimize purple tape within the power sector.” It’s a change from the imaginative and prescient the affiliation specified by 2020 after the election of former president Joe Biden, when Hopper promised to “meet the second of the local weather period with fairness and justice on the forefront.”
