Why is that this battle taking place? The brief model is that Trump and his advisers imagine that tariffs will assist the US economic system by encouraging building of factories right here, decreasing commerce deficits and punishing boundaries to entry of US merchandise in different international locations.
“We are going to supercharge our home industrial base,” Trump stated in an April 2 speech asserting tariffs on practically each US buying and selling companion. “We are going to pry open overseas markets and break down overseas commerce boundaries and finally, extra manufacturing at house will imply stronger competitors and decrease costs for customers.”
A tariff is a tax charged by a authorities on imports. Because the US authorities has elevated its tariffs, different international locations have retaliated with their very own will increase.
Including to the chaos is that the insurance policies continuously change, with the president typically asserting shifts on social media, as occurred in current days on tariffs on the European Union.
I spoke with Chris Seiple, Wooden Mackenzie’s vice chairman for energy and renewables, to drill down on the elements of the report that take care of renewables. Right here is that dialog, edited for size and readability:
Dan Gearino: For renewable power industries, is the massive drawback that tariffs make every little thing dearer, or is there extra to it than that?
Chris Seiple: Positive, issues getting dearer is an enormous a part of it. I believe the second problem, and that is sort of distinctive to the ability enterprise, is that there’s a heavy hand of regulation. And so there’s lots of US utilities that should undergo fairly intensive regulatory processes to get approval for what they need to construct. Being in a world the place there’s a lot tariff uncertainty, they don’t know what it’s going to price to construct what they need to construct. It’s notably difficult for this business to have the ability to navigate that, and it impacts renewables greater than it impacts, say, different sectors like fuel or coal, as a result of we depend upon imports of kit to such an even bigger diploma, particularly for battery storage, the place we’re primarily totally dependent at this level on imports from China.
With battery storage, there was an try to extend manufacturing capability within the US. How would you characterize the place that stands?
Very early days. Lots of battery manufacturing that’s occurring throughout the US is supposed to produce batteries to EV autos, not stationary utility-scale storage tasks. And so the quantity of producing capability compared to what the demand is for that gear ends in us importing nicely greater than 90 % of what we want.
