Why is that this battle occurring? The quick model is that Trump and his advisers imagine that tariffs will assist the US economic system by encouraging development 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 mentioned in an April 2 speech asserting tariffs on practically each US buying and selling companion. “We are going to pry open international markets and break down international commerce boundaries and in the end, extra manufacturing at residence will imply stronger competitors and decrease costs for shoppers.”
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 regularly change, with the president usually 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 components of the report that cope with renewables. Right here is that dialog, edited for size and readability:
Dan Gearino: For renewable vitality industries, is the large drawback that tariffs make every part dearer, or is there extra to it than that?
Chris Seiple: Certain, issues getting dearer is a giant a part of it. I feel the second problem, and that is type of distinctive to the ability enterprise, is that there’s a heavy hand of regulation. And so there’s a variety of US utilities that should undergo fairly intensive regulatory processes to get approval for what they wish 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 wish to construct. It’s significantly difficult for this business to have the ability to navigate that, and it impacts renewables greater than it impacts, say, different sectors like gasoline or coal, as a result of we depend on imports of apparatus to such a much bigger diploma, particularly for battery storage, the place we’re primarily fully 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. Loads of battery manufacturing that’s happening throughout the US is supposed to provide 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’d like.
