This Week in Cleantech is a weekly podcast covering the most impactful stories in clean energy and climate featuring Paul Gerke of Factor This and Tigercomm’s Mike Casey.
This week’s episode features special guest Mark Chediak from Bloomberg, who breaks down Trump’s new 15% tariffs and price floors on imported polysilicon and its derivatives, including wafers, cells and modules.
This week’s “Cleantecher of the Week” is Kumo Sharma, founder of Arkaya Energy. His company’s milk-source heat pump pulls heat straight out of fresh milk as it’s chilled for cheesemaking, then uses that heat to make near-boiling water for washdown — cutting England’s Barber’s Farmhouse Cheesemakers’ electricity use in half and saving them about $94,000 a year. Congratulations, Kumo!
Base Power just locked down a $1 billion funding round, putting the company’s valuation at $13 billion. The three-year-old startup has installed more than 23,000 backyard batteries across Texas and the Chicago area, and runs about 100 installations a day, which they expect to double by year-end. The newest battery units store enough for 36 hours of backup for most homes, and installation is down to under an hour thanks to a pre-wired, modular design.
Trump has spent his second term gutting support for EVs, killing the $7,500 tax credit, rolling back pollution standards, and stalling charging infrastructure funding. But last week he unveiled $3 billion for critical mineral projects, and those happen to be exactly what EV batteries need.
EVs represent 70% of global lithium demand versus 20% for battery storage and a sliver for defense. EV sales ticked up in both the U.S. and China in Q2 versus Q1, partly a byproduct of oil prices spiking amid the Iran war.
Nebraska has a nameplate capacity tax that charges wind and solar developments $3,518 per megawatt of generating capacity every year, with the money flowing to counties and local school districts instead of standard property taxes. One Nebraska school district used nine years of that revenue, about $7.6 million, to help fund a $13.2 million expansion of its junior-senior high school.
But more than 88% of that money went to just 10 of Nebraska’s 93 counties. The 10 counties getting almost all the tax money are the counties where the wind and solar farms sit. A lot of the other 83 counties have made sure none get built on their land at all, through moratoriums or zoning that blocks them outright.
A federal judge in Oregon ordered the Pentagon to lift its freeze on reviewing new onshore wind projects, ruling the renewable energy groups suing the agency are likely to win their case. Since April, the Pentagon halted all reviews it’s supposed to run to check whether wind turbines interfere with military radar or flight paths, a process that used to move fairly routinely.
That freeze has stalled 106 wind projects across 21 states, representing about $47 billion in potential investment, and there’s another 29 gigawatts of wind sitting in the Pentagon’s review queue right now. The judge, a Trump appointee, ordered the Pentagon to restart reviews and report its progress back to the court every 30 days.
Trump’s new Section 232 order imposes 15% tariffs and price floors on imported polysilicon and its derivatives, including wafers, cells and modules, starting December 4, aiming to close loopholes that let Chinese-linked producers keep shifting production to new countries to dodge prior country-specific tariffs.
China still dominates upstream solar supply, producing the vast majority of the world’s panels and polysilicon, and the US notably lacks domestic wafer manufacturing, leaving American producers reliant on imported components even as panel manufacturing grows. Domestic manufacturers welcomed the move, while installers warn it will raise already-high US solar prices, and analysts note that without consumer incentives too, demand for domestic products may still lag.
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