WASHINGTON — The message coming out of the Solar Energy Industries Association’s 30×30 Policy Forum on Dec. 2 was optimistic and unequivocal: the Build Back Better Act would be passed by the Senate.

Exactly when and in what form the budget reconciliation package would make it to President Biden’s desk are still uncertain, but its $555 billion in energy funding — including 10 years of solar and storage investment tax credits (ITCs) — are not among the sticking points under debate in the Senate.

Build Back Better “is going to get done, and it’s the largest investment in clean energy by any country ever,” Trent Bauserman, senior policy adviser to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), said during a congressional update at the forum. “And the really interesting thing is, for all the trials and tribulations of getting this across the House floor, nobody was really talking about paring back climate.”

Bauserman was confident about passage in part, he said, because about 90 to 95% of the bill’s provisions were “pre-conferenced” with Senate moderates before it passed in the House of Representatives on Nov. 19. (See House Passes $1.75 Trillion Build Back Better Act.) And while the Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would have paid utilities to decarbonize their generation, was cut from the bill, those funds were reallocated to other energy initiatives, he said.

The focus now, for SEIA members and other speakers at the forum, are the tax incentives in the bill, which are seen as critical to reaching Biden’s goal of a clean power system by 2035, and SEIA’s target of 30% of U.S. power generation coming from solar by 2030.

Keynote speaker Ali Zaidi, deputy national climate adviser at the White House, said the bill would “help propel deployment [of clean technologies] — which we know is connected to manufacturing — over the next decade through a tax policy that incentivizes deploying [solar] in those lower-income areas; through a tax policy that incentivizes paying a good wage; through a tax policy that provides folks certainty to know that in 2030, we’ll still be there.”

Alice Lin, budget and tax policy adviser for the House Ways and Means Committee, recalled that Democrats had been fighting for two years to get a five-year extension for solar and wind tax credits. “Getting any extension at all was a tremendously difficult task,” she said. “I don’t have to tell you all what the outlook looks like with these one- [and] two-year extensions and what that does to the building of uncertainty.”

Including prevailing wage provisions in the tax incentives also helped build strong labor support for the bill, Lin said. Projects paying prevailing wages — the basic hourly rate for public works projects in a given area — are eligible for a “bonus” incentive.

“It was very clear that if we did not figure out how to ensure that our labor friends were fully part of the process, we would not be looking at the same conversation on extensions again,” she said. “We worked early and often with our labor friends in order to figure out a path forward,” which involved a lot of education on labor laws and domestic content standards, she said.

‘Locked and Loaded’

Ending a range of solar tariffs, primarily on components and panels from China, is another major target for SEIA. The U.S. International Trade Commission recently recommended extending the Section 201 tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump, but the final decision rests with Biden.

During a session on building a U.S. supply chain, Costa Nicolaou, CEO of racking manufacturer PanelClaw, said the tariffs and other anti-dumping and countervailing duties (AD/CVD) intended to spur U.S. solar manufacturing have instead “crushed the industry [while] the value chain grew in other parts of the world.”

And although the solar industry as a whole showed strong growth in recent years, “it was in spite of, not because of AD/CVD,” said Nicolaou, who also chairs SEIA’s manufacturing division.

“One of the things that we’ve realized over the last 10 years is that trade and manufacturing policy are inextricably linked,” he said. “People aren’t just going to move here and move their businesses here out of the goodness of their hearts because politicians want them to. They need real incentives that allow them to grow their business, to hire people [and] invest in technology.”

The 10 years of tax credits for advanced manufacturing in the budget reconciliation bill will provide a long enough runway for companies coming to the U.S. to recoup their investments, he said.

At the same time, the tax credits — focused on solar panels, wind turbines and storage technologies — still create winners and losers, said Jessica Lawrence-Vaca, director of policy and stakeholder engagement for SOLV Energy (formerly Swinerton Renewable Energy), which builds and maintains projects. “At what point do we transition to a manufacturing tax credit … that will help the whole of the industry?” she said.

Pointing to system components that are not eligible for Build Back Better tax credits, Lawrence-Vaca said, “There’s another 50% of the solar value chain that is not being incentivized.”

The 10-year runway for building out a full manufacturing supply chain will also be critical, Nicolaou said. Many companies, he said, are “locked and loaded,” ready to start investing in new facilities once Build Back Better is passed, but they will have different time frames.

“It can be pretty quick on the panel assembly side, when the components from overseas [are] assembled here,” he said. “What will take longer is the cradle-to-grave [supply chain]; that will not be built for panels overnight. So, there’s a transition we have to manage.”

Zaidi agreed. “We’ve got real challenges when it comes to the supply chain,” he said. “And we’ve been, I think, having a really honest dialogue with the industry about what it’s going to take to create the conditions, again, for private capital to feel confident rushing in and making the sort of investments that we’re going to need to grow this market.”

Allies Needed

The rapid deployment of solar should mean more than just the 1 million jobs SEIA estimates will be created by reaching its 30×30 target — up from the 231,000 jobs counted in the 2020 Solar Job Census, which SEIA co-sponsored with other solar advocates.

The goal here should be to “make sure that folks really do have an opportunity to have a long-term career in the clean energy industry and feel fully supported both from a salary perspective, a benefits perspective and everything that comes along with that,” said Nicole Steele, senior advisor for equity and workforce at the Department of Energy.

Attracting and retaining a diverse, inclusive clean energy workforce that “looks like America … requires targeted recruitment and targeted mentorship and really thoughtful training and skills development,” Steele said during a video address to the forum.

DOE is working with the Department of Labor to leverage their existing programs, she said, but incorporating equity into workforce development should be industry-driven.

Labor unions’ training centers and apprenticeship programs, and their 20,000 instructors, could be a good fit for solar workforce development, said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a group that includes 13 labor unions and environmental organizations.

“If the system were a four-year, degree-granting institution, that would be the largest four-year institution in the country,” Walsh said.

He also stressed the political upside of a solar industry-union partnership. “Opponents of renewable energy have a playbook. … It is to use every siting, permitting and regulatory and legal lever to slow down or block deployment of solar energy,” he said. “Whether it is in any of your county commission meetings or PUC meetings or state legislatures, the solar industry will need allies to show up with you,” something that labor unions are “very, very good at,” he said.

George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy, said his company works on projects across the country and hires 85% or more of their workforce locally. “It’s diverse by nature” and geography, he said, “and then a portion of those employees want to stay in the industry, and they want to travel.”

Building a diverse solar workforce also provides “an opportunity to push back on, frankly, some larger cultural trends,” Walsh said. “We have devalued blue-collar work over decades. This is incredibly important, incredibly skilled work. The more we can demonstrate that it is those things … the more you change that cultural conversation, and you change the profile of this workforce.”