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 building of factories right here, lowering commerce deficits and punishing obstacles to entry of US merchandise in different nations.
“We are going to supercharge our home industrial base,” Trump mentioned in an April 2 speech saying tariffs on practically each US buying and selling accomplice. “We are going to pry open international markets and break down international commerce obstacles and in the end, extra manufacturing at dwelling 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 nations have retaliated with their very own will increase.
Including to the chaos is that the insurance policies ceaselessly change, with the president usually saying 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 massive drawback that tariffs make every little thing costlier, or is there extra to it than that?
Chris Seiple: Positive, issues getting costlier is a giant a part of it. I believe the second problem, and that is form of distinctive to the ability enterprise, is that there’s a heavy hand of regulation. And so there’s quite a lot of US utilities that need to 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 value 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 gasoline or coal, as a result of we rely on imports of kit to such a much bigger diploma, particularly for battery storage, the place we’re primarily solely 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 happening throughout the US is supposed to produce batteries to EV autos, not stationary utility-scale storage initiatives. And so the quantity of producing capability compared to what the demand is for that tools leads to us importing effectively greater than 90 p.c of what we want.
