Congressional wrangling over the size and scope of the COVID-19 relief bill and the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump could easily push an infrastructure financing bill into the second quarter, imperiling the legislative goals of clean energy industries, the American Council on Renewable Energy warned last week.

“There are only so many times when Congress is going to pass legislation measured in the trillions of dollars, or even hundreds of billions,” ACORE COO Bill Parsons said at the group’s quarterly industry update, which featured a panel discussion about what the Biden administration ought to do to promote renewable energy generation, the grid and electric vehicles.

“This is an administration that understands the pieces of the puzzle,” Parsons said, noting that the president has already announced a goal to decarbonize the nation’s power sector by 2035, increase offshore wind development and make massive investments in the nation’s transmission system.

Yet, the political distance between the administration’s goals and congressional approval is difficult to measure at this point, Parsons said.

He warned that the wrangling over the pandemic relief bill and Trump’s impeachment could “poison the well” and leave the administration with little “gas in the tank” when Congress takes up infrastructure spending, probably in the spring.

Although there does appear to be bipartisan support for clean energy tax incentives, he said the window for passage could be narrow, noting that both Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) face re-election next year. A loss by either could change the balance of power in the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats each have 50 seats.

“We have an almost once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact a stable, predictable, long-term clean energy tax platform this year. That is going to be a priority for us, on top of the infrastructure and transmission” issues, he said.

Despite the split Congress and the pandemic that caused the layoff of more than 400,000 clean energy workers, clean energy begins 2021 in better shape than predicted, BloombergNEF analyst Ethan Zindler said.

“The industry really demonstrated a high degree of resiliency last year.  Given that the U.S. GDP contracted by about 3.5% in 2020, I think the performance of the industry is pretty remarkable,” he said, explaining that renewable developers spent about $50 billion on U.S. projects in 2020.

Ladeene Freimuth, president of the Freimuth Group and a senior adviser to the think tank Securing America’s Future Energy, said the nation’s energy situation is “urgent.”

“We are proposing a comprehensive approach that we are calling a ‘Minerals to Markets’ approach.  We must act now if we are going to achieve both a clean energy future and a secure energy future and maintain our economic competitiveness,” she said.

China currently controls nearly 70% of global electric vehicle battery manufacturing capacity, including direct or indirect control of the world’s lithium supply as well as nickel, cobalt, graphite and other minerals that are critical to these supply chains, she said.

China is building or planning to build over 100 lithium-ion battery factories, she added. The United States, in contrast, has just nine planned battery factories.

“That is a huge discrepancy. We are dragging behind and we need to catch up from an economic and national security perspective,” she said.

Tom Starrs, vice president for government affairs at EDP Renewables, agreed that the industry is thriving but wondered whether renewable energy developers would embrace Biden’s emphasis on union labor and domestic manufacturing, calling it a “quid pro quo” policy by the administration.

“There is no question that Biden’s plan is very strongly in favor of additional clean energy investment across the board,” he added. “But there is going to be strong pressure on renewable energy in the broader clean energy sector to step up.”

As for boosting U.S. manufacturing of batteries, solar panels and electronic controls, Starrs said the challenge “is essentially overhauling the entire supply chain to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. the way it was 30 years ago.

“We have just lost the material supply chain associated with the raw materials that are needed for industrial manufacturing processes,” he said. “That’s going to take a much more fundamental and targeted effort.”

Johannes Urpelainen, director of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said there is broad agreement by energy analysts in the United States and globally that the transition to renewable energy is inevitable.

“There is still a question of how fast it will go and exactly how we get there. I don’t think anybody is saying we will be burning coal 30 years from now. This is new.”