Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Association for Solar Energy Industries, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss her prospects for solar energy and clean energy under Biden.
Video transcription
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SEANA SMITH: Elected President Joe Biden has campaigned for ambitious energy goals, but now the question is, of course, what will his government be able to implement? So, for more information, we want to bring in Abigail Ross Hopper. She is president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Abigail, great to have you on the program. Solar ETFs, clean energy stocks, have been performing really well since we won the election. I think the big question now is: what should be at the top of the Biden administration’s agenda when it comes to clean energy? How do you see it?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: Yes, well, thank you for having me. I think that’s clear. What should be at the top of the agenda is how we can get it all done even faster. There is a demand from consumers for solar energy and clean energy. There is the infrastructure to make that happen. And so we just have to make it happen faster.
And so we can do it with tax policy, with smart trade policy, with transfer, with infrastructure. But there are many things the Biden government can do to make it happen faster.
– Like removing rates. But would not that give the Chinese companies an advantage, who – you know, the first time we tried it, Solyndra, undercut them? And I know Solyndra is not the sticker child for big companies. But the Chinese manufacturers are subsidized by the Chinese government and have undermined American solar power. What then does it help to remove tariffs?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: Removing the tar– I mean, the tariffs really do not help domestic manufacturers. If you look at what has happened in the last three years, we have seen a reasonable decrease in the number of jobs in solar power, as opposed to a small increase in increased manufacturing work. And so when we think about what the goal is here, as we really want to achieve, the rates do not achieve it.
Thus, we propose a whole range of policies that we believe can take place according to the Biden administration, which will help local manufacturing. Rates are just not the right way to do it. However, there are rates that prevent the counter-dumping, to which you are referring, around China. The ones we are really interested in are the ones that apply to solar modules and solar cells from all over the world. It was used by the Trump administration about three years ago and, despite our growth, has really had a significant impact on our industry.
SEANA SMITH: Well, and, Abigail, I’m talking about the impact, I think the question is, to what extent did the trade tariffs then limit the growth? I know you said you could still grow during this time, but where would we be if they were not in force?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: Yes, that’s an interesting argument to make, right. How do you prove the absence of growth? We looked at what we had predicted even before the tariff case was filed, and we continued with an upward trajectory. Over 2017 and 2018, we were flat. And so we can really clearly see that the growth we expected did not happen.
We have now grown at a steady pace, but again, not as much as we expected, we would not be growing without those rates. That said, you know, we increased by 43% in 2019, the center of a pandemic. So the demand for solar power is strong, and I think this government will be well prepared to find the best ways to help us grow and grow faster so that we can get more Americans to work, and we can help solve the climate crisis. . And I think clean energy plays a very important role in solving the crisis in the environment.
– What about some kind of standard policy nationwide? And I tell this because I have relatives of my other half. They have a big house in New Jersey. They got the solar power on the roof.
They literally pay $ 6 a month for electricity in the summer. And yet the obstacles they have gone through are a nightmare because they do not have the battery to store the co-payment they give. I do not think they sell back, but you come here where I go. Why not make this standard instead of 50 different policies?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: You have my voice. [LAUGHS] You vote for it. What you’re raising is actually one of the hallmarks of US energy policy and one of the challenges, whether it’s now, is that we have federal energy policy, and then we have 50 states with their own set of rules and their own ideas on how to do it. must work. You specifically talked about residential solar power. And one of the things we think we can standardize and that the federal government can help with is getting rid of some, what we call, soft costs, law, the cost of consent and delays, and 100 different rules for different jurisdictions.
And that’s why we’ve worked with the National Renewable Energy Lab to standardize some of them and make them more consistent across all countries, so that costs come out and it’s easier for consumers to adopt solar power. We also think that there are many ways in which this type of tax policy can be standardized, and that the transfer policy can be standardized. Land use can be standardized, best practices for where we apply solar power and how we do it. So I think there are a lot of ways we can make it less challenging, a little more cookie cutter, so there are a lot of ways we can facilitate the use of solar power.
SEANA SMITH: Abigail Ross Hopper, President and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association. Thank you for taking the time.
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: Thank you so much for having me.