Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss its outlook for solar and clean energy under Biden.
Video transcription
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SEANA SMITH: President-elect Joe Biden campaigned with ambitious energy targets, but of course the question now is: what will his government be able to implement? So, to learn more about this, we want to bring Abigail Ross Hopper. She is president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Abigail, great to have you on the show. Solar ETFs, clean energy stocks, they have really surpassed since we received the election results. I think the big question now is: what should be at the top of the Biden government’s agenda here when it comes to clean energy? How do you see that?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: Yes, well, thanks for having me. I think it’s clear. What needs to be at the top of the agenda is how we can make it all happen even faster, right. There is consumer demand for solar and clean energy. There is the infrastructure to make this happen. And then we just need to make it happen more quickly.
And then we can do that with tax policy, with smart commercial policy, with transmission, with infrastructure. But there are many things that the Biden administration can do just to make it happen faster.
– How to remove tariffs. But that would not give an advantage, say, to Chinese companies, which – you know, the first time we tried this, Solyndra, they decreased. And I know that Solyndra is not the poster girl for big companies. But Chinese manufacturers were subsidized by the Chinese government and undermined US solar energy. So, what’s the point of removing tariffs?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: Removing tar – I mean, tariffs are not really helping domestic manufacturers. If you look at what happened in the past three years, we saw a very significant drop in jobs in the solar field, as opposed to a small increase in the increase in jobs in the industry. So, if we think about what the objective is here, like, what we are really trying to accomplish, the tariffs are not fulfilling that.
So, we really propose a whole set of policies that we think the Biden government could enact that would help encourage domestic manufacturing. Fares are simply not the right way to do this. We have tariffs in place that avoid anti-dumping, which is what you are referring to, around China. The ones that really interest us are those that apply to solar modules and solar cells from anywhere in the world. They were implemented by the Trump administration about three years ago and really – despite our growth, they have had a very significant impact on our industry.
SEANA SMITH: Well, and Abigail, talking about that impact, I think the question is, to what extent have trade rates then limited growth? I know you were saying that you were still able to grow during that time, but where would we be if they weren’t in place?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: Yes, it’s an interesting argument to make, right. How do you prove the lack of growth? We observed what we had planned even before the tariff process was initiated and continued on an upward path. Throughout 2017 and 2018, instead, we were stagnant. And so we can see very clearly that that growth that we had anticipated did not happen.
Now we have been growing at a steady pace, but again, not as much as we expected we would be growing without these tariffs. That said, you know, we grew 43% year on year in 2019, in the middle of a pandemic. So the demand for solar energy is strong and I think this administration will be well positioned to find the best ways to help our growth and help us grow faster so that we can get more Americans back to work, we can help resolve the problem. climate crisis. And I think that clean energy also has a very important role to play in solving the environmental justice crisis.
– How about some kind of standard policy across the country? And I bring this because I have relatives from my other half. They have a big house in New Jersey. They have solar material on the roof.
They are literally paying $ 6 a month for electricity in the summer. And yet, the obstacles they’ve been through are a nightmare, because they don’t have the battery to store the excess they provide. I don’t think they sell it back, but you got where I want to go. Why not make this standard instead of 50 different policies?
ABIGAIL ROSS HOPPER: You have my vote. [LAUGHS] You have my vote for that. What you raise is really one of the hallmarks of American energy policy and one of the challenges, of course, is that we have a federal energy policy, and so we have 50 states with their own set of rules and their own ideas about how it should work. You spoke specifically about residential solar energy. And one of the things that we think we can standardize and that the federal government can help is to get rid of some of them, what we call flexible costs, right, the cost of licensing and delays and 100 different rules for several different jurisdictions.
And so, we have been working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to standardize part of this and make it more consistent in all states, so that these costs appear and it is easier for consumers to adopt solar energy. We also think that there are many ways to standardize the right type of tax policy and to standardize transmission policy. Land use can be standardized, the best practices for where we install solar energy and how we do it. So I think there are many ways to make it less challenging, a little bit simpler, so that there are many ways to facilitate the adoption of solar energy.
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 very much for having me.