"The Inflation Reduction Act is a sweeping piece of legislation that invests broadly in renewable energy technology and manufacturing and supports healthcare while significantly lowering the federal deficit.
The energy provisions represent a historical shift in the United States' renewable energy policy from a focus purely on R&D and deployment. Beyond R&D, there is now a more comprehensive framework with significant incentives for domestic manufacturing of PV technologies across the supply chain and PV deployment.
Also, for the first time, the IRA establishes a secure, long-term policy horizon of 10 years, which is critical to supporting large-scale manufacturing investments. It is notably an "all-carrots" approach, using incentives rather than requirements to achieve its goals and the significant employment they will bring. One analysis estimates the IRA could spur 9 million climatetech jobs by 2032. The provisions of the IRA are already resulting in significant expansion in U.S. solar-manufacturing capacity across the supply chain.
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The last decade has seen virtually all PV-manufacturing growth occur in China. Over the period of 2010 to 2020, global PV-manufacturing capacity exploded from about 25 GW to around 400 GW. To give a sense of the scale of this increase, in the same period that global solar-manufacturing capacity grew by almost 17X, global gross domestic product grew by only about 1/3."
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Kat Friedrich
Editor in Chief
ASES
Monona WI
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