By Michael Brooks

WASHINGTON — Last week was a busy one for the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The trade association held its annual policy summit at the Washington Plaza Hotel on Wednesday, on the eve of both the International Trade Commission’s midterm review of the Trump administration’s tariffs on imported solar panels and a Court of International Trade ruling affirming the exemption of bifacial modules from the tariffs.

On Thursday morning, SEIA held a rally outside of the trade commission’s headquarters in D.C., calling upon “solar workers, advocates and anyone passionate about fair solar trade policy” to attend and show support for ending the tariffs.

But Wednesday’s summit acted as a rally of sorts as well, as the solar investment tax credit expires at the end of this year, and legislation to extend it faces stiff competition for congressional attention amid impeachment proceedings and a Dec. 20 deadline to fund the government.

SEIA President Abigail Ross Hopper and keynote speakers urged attendees to be more active in contacting their representatives in Congress, particularly if those representatives are Republican.

The event opened with a speech from U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), who in July introduced the Senate version of a bill that would extend the tax credit for another five years. (The House version was introduced by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.)

“I need your help,” she said. “I need your help with some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle. … Just make the call, if you haven’t already. They don’t need to publicly sign onto to the bill. … Just ask them to reach out to Mitch [Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)] and tell him why this is so important; why this needs to be passed; why this needs to be part of the package at the end of the day.”

Hopper echoed Cortez Masto’s call to action before she began her own speech, noting that she has found people in the industry to be timid when it comes to calling their representatives.

Many of the panels that followed focused on the best ways to lobby Republicans on solar energy policy. Speakers told their own success stories and described the gradually changing political landscape around renewable energy and climate change as encouragement for attendees.

Brandon Audap, vice president of government relations for Citizens For Responsible Energy Solutions, spoke about his efforts to lobby Republicans on climate change. His organization focuses only on trying to convince the GOP to enact “responsible, conservative solutions” to solve the problem.

As SEIA’s former director of federal affairs, Audap worked on the first tax credit legislation. Though “Republicans are more engaged on climate change,” there is no unified party stance on it, so his organization has had to canvas every elected official in Congress (250) individually, he said.

The good news for the industry: “The era of the Republican climate denier is coming to an end. It’s a dying breed. I could name a handful of serious climate deniers still.”

The bad news: “Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of guys who talk about climate change but have no intention of ever doing anything or advancing clean energy or tax credits.” He described a conversation he had with House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who told him, “‘Basically our guys are comfortable talking about airplanes and cow farts’” to mock the Green New Deal, a proposed resolution by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Scalise’s reference came from a draft FAQ accidentally released by Ocasio-Cortez’s staff and later retracted, which Republicans have seized on to claim Democrats secretly want to ban air travel and hamburgers.

Audap said Scalise continued to say that “‘we’re going to ring all the political hay out of the Green New Deal and then get around to doing some serious policy.’”

The Economy, Stupid

The key then, panelists said, is to focus on the economic benefits of solar rather than the environmental ones.

Boyd Brown, one of the three partners in lobbying firm Tompkins, Thompson & Brown, described his firm’s successful efforts earlier this year to get South Carolina’s Energy Freedom Act passed into law. Both houses of the state legislature unanimously voted to pass the bill after its introduction in January, and Gov. Henry McMaster signed it into law in May. Among the provisions supporting solar power, the law permanently eliminated any caps on net metering. It also requires utilities to consider offering neighborhood community solar programs and for their integrated resource plans to fairly evaluate solar-plus-storage investments.

Brown, a former Democratic member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, laid out the challenge the solar industry faces on the lobbying battlefield. “You got to start peeling back this onion legislatively in these states where utilities have had the ability to run roughshod over the landscape over the last half-century,” he said. “You guys are really new to the game. And these folks are entrenched.” During the battle for the Energy Freedom Act, “I think there were like eight registered solar lobbyists in South Carolina, versus 67 utility lobbyists. So it was really a David-versus-Goliath match.”

South Carolina is also a rural, deeply conservative state, and concerns about climate change do not resonate with its residents, nor with those in similar states, multiple speakers said.

But the bill was spurred by and benefited from “a groundswell of pure hatred, really, for Big Nuclear and Big Energy” after the failure of SCANA’s expansion of the V.C. Summer nuclear plant, for which customers were left on the hook, Brown said.

“I’m not sure the words ‘climate change’ ever came out of my mouth when I was lobbying legislators in South Carolina. We talked about ‘energy freedom’; we talked about consumer choices; we talked about free-market and fair-market principles,” he said. “We were like, ‘Where are … the free markets that Republicans are supposed to believe in?’ So we were really able to … build a coalition around Democrats who believed in protecting the environment and Republicans who believed in fair-market principles.”

Corey Schrodt, legislative director for Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Fla.), advised attendees to “always localize” data they use in their messages, such as how much money constituents would save or how many jobs would be created. “When people see the numbers, especially big jumps in numbers, it catches their attention.”

He also stressed that every call, email and letter from constituents to their representatives is logged by staff. Each week, members of Congress are given statistics on how many messages they received and what issues they were about. “When you call in, it does get tracked. I can’t speak for every office, but I know that most offices use that information to their advantage in how they contact, how they message their own constituents.”

“Just put your best foot forward,” Audap said. “Don’t feel like you need to convince them on climate change to get their support for solar. That’s frankly irrelevant in a lot of offices, even some Democratic offices.”

Brandon Presley, Mississippi Public Service Commissioner and new president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, said for many residents, it’s not a matter of whether they believe in climate change. As an elected official in a poor district, “I represent people that worry about tonight how they’re going to feed their children, and how they’re going to put gas in the van to get them back and forth to school. And if I’m talking to them about climate change, although that’s important to me … [I’m] not making headway” with his constituents on solar policy.

Next Steps

The Court of International Trade on Thursday blocked the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s decision to revoke bifacial modules’ exemption from the solar panel tariffs, ruling that the office had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by not providing notice or opportunity to comment on a proposed decision.

“This is an important temporary reprieve for the bifacial module exclusion,” Hopper said in a statement after the decision. “We will continue to make the case that the … tariffs are harming the U.S. industry and the American consumer and that the bifacial exclusion was a fair and reasonable solution to the problem of domestic module supply shortages.”

The International Trade Commission will submit a report to President Trump on the tariffs as part of its midterm review by Feb. 7. At Wednesday’s summit, SEIA General Counsel John Smirnow said he thinks that the administration would eventually drop the tariffs, but he noted that Trump is notoriously unpredictable, especially when it comes to trade. The president’s tweets can lead to a drop in the stock market one day, and a rebound the next. “Anybody who tells you they know what is happening, what’s going to happen, dates certain … I’d be surprised if they actually do,” he said.

Erin Duncan, SEIA vice president of congressional affairs, asked Schrodt if a carbon tax or dividend would be the next big policy battle after the tax credit extension. Rooney is the only Republican supporter of the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, which would tax the carbon emitted by fuels, deposit the revenue into a new Carbon Dividend Trust Fund and distribute the funds back to taxpayers.

“The unfortunate reality is that we’re headed into a campaign year,” Schrodt said. “I’ve been on the Hill long enough to know that we have from now to maybe until March to really do anything. It’s going to take smaller bites of the apple.”

Unmentioned by Schrodt is that Rooney is not running for re-election. His announcement came in October, one day after he told CNN he was open to investigating whether Trump should be impeached.