Trump’s trade war will damage the entire U.S. energy sector, from oil to solar, analysts say
Why does this conflict occur? The short version is that Trump and his advisers believe that tariffs will help the U.S. economy by encouraging factory construction here, reducing trade deficits and punishing other countries for barriers to accessing U.S. products.
“We will strengthen our domestic industrial base,” Trump said in a speech on April 2. Almost every U.S. trading partner announced tariffs. “We will pry open the foreign market and break foreign trade barriers, and ultimately, more production will mean stronger competition and lower consumer prices.”
Tariffs are the government’s tax on imports. As the U.S. government raises tariffs, other countries themselves have increased revenge.
Add to that chaos, policy changes frequently, and the president often announces changes on social media, just like tariffs on the EU in recent days.
I spoke with Chris Seiple, Vice Chairman of Power and Renewable Energy at Wood Mackenzie to study the report section related to renewable energy. Here is the conversation, edited as length and clear:
Dan Gearino: Will tariffs make everything more expensive for the renewable energy industry, or are there more problems?
Chris Seiple: Of course, things are getting more and more expensive are a big part of it. I think the second challenge is unique to the power business and has a strict regulatory hand. So many of our utilities have to go through a fairly extensive regulatory process to get approval for what they want to build. In a world with a lot of tariff uncertainty, they don’t know how much it will cost to build what they want to build. It is especially challenging for this industry to be able to navigate it, and its impact on renewable energy is far more than other sectors, such as natural gas or coal, because we rely on imports of equipment to a greater extent, especially for battery storage, which we are essentially entirely dependent on imports from China at this time.
By storing batteries, attempts have been made to improve manufacturing capabilities in the United States. How would you characterize the position of the stand?
Very early. Many battery manufacturing ongoing in the United States are designed to provide batteries for electric vehicle vehicles, rather than fixed utility-scale storage projects. Therefore, the quantity of manufacturing capacity results in over 90% of our imports compared to the demand for equipment.
