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WIND: Federal officials designate Equinor the provisional winner of a 2 GW offshore wind energy lease auction off the Delaware coast; bidding started at $10.1 million, but the developer locked in at $75 million. (Maryland Matters)
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PIPELINES: The Conservation Law Foundation says National Grid isn’t doing enough to handle the hundreds of leaking gas pipelines around the Greater Boston area, 15 of which are imminent explosion and fire hazards. (Boston Herald)
BUILDINGS: Philadelphia’s school district touts the new cooling systems in ten of its schools, but dozens of schools still lack A/C, a problem that hinders education when children have to be sent home during too-hot conditions. (WHYY)
BIOENERGY: In Burlington, Vermont, activists against a wood-fired power plant say the facility’s $8 million in expected losses this year — not to mention the emissions and its relative inefficiency — should be enough to shut it down. (Seven Days)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: Connecticut utility commissioners decide electric utilities can apply for annual cost recovery related to the mandated electric vehicle charging incentive program, although some advocates say it will cause additional stress on ratepayers. (Hartford Courant, News Times)
BATTERIES: A Long Island, New York, town fails to pass a proposed one-year moratorium on new large battery storage systems after several neighboring municipalities passed similar moratoriums. (Newsday)
GRID: Workers begin installing roughly 100 miles of underwater power cables in Lake Champlain for the Champlain Hudson Power Express transmission project. (NCPR)
POLITICS: Many New Hampshire gubernatorial candidates support renewable energy but have starkly different approaches for increasing the state’s capacity. (Concord Monitor)
RENEWABLE ENERGY:
SOLAR: The impending construction of a solar panel factory shows how the industry is bringing jobs and investment to Virginia, even as nearly a third of all counties in the state have passed regulations restricting solar project development. (WVTF)
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CARBON CAPTURE:
COAL: The son of a late coal baron has acquired an Alabama coal mine that nearby residents say caused a fatal home explosion earlier this year. (Inside Climate News)
UTILITIES: CenterPoint Energy, now under fire for its response to widespread outages in Houston after Hurricane Beryl, has courted dozens of current and former state lawmakers at its private conference center. (Houston Chronicle)
POLITICS:
DALTON, Ga. — Growing up in Cartersville, Georgia, Lisa Nash saw what happens to communities when factory jobs disappear. It was the 1980s and corporations were offshoring production to reduce costs and raise profits. The jobs that remained in this northwest corner of the state were typically lower-paying ones that didn’t offer the same ladder to the middle class.
“My parents and grandparents were in manufacturing, and they were the ones saying, ‘Don’t do it,’” Nash recalled.
Nash disregarded their advice, embarking instead on a long career in manufacturing — first in textiles, followed by stints in aviation, automotive, and steel. Now she’s helping to bring higher-tech, higher-paying factory work back to the corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga.
Nash is the general manager of the Qcells solar panel factory in Dalton, a town of 34,000 located 50 miles up I-75 from her hometown. It opened in January 2019, after the Trump administration imposed a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese-made panels. The Korean conglomerate Hanwha owns Qcells, and initially planned to hire several hundred people at the site, Nash told me on a recent visit to the factory. By the end of 2019, it employed more than 800.
Then, in 2020, Georgia helped elect President Joe Biden and sent two Democrats to the Senate, clinching a thin majority. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock got to work crafting detailed policies to promote domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies, which China had dominated for years; they wanted solar panels and batteries made in America — specifically Georgia — instead of in China, a geopolitical rival.
Those measures made it into the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August 2022 — two years ago this week. The legislation created the nation’s first comprehensive policies to support domestic clean energy manufacturing. Qcells broke ground on a second facility in Dalton in February 2023. Completed that August, the expansion added two football fields’ worth of manufacturing space with four new production lines — which produce 1.5 times more solar panels than the original three lines, thanks to technological advances. Now the whole complex employs 2,000 people full time and makes 5.1 gigawatts of solar panels a year, more than any other site in the U.S.
Politicians have been promising for decades to retrain American workers and revive long-lost manufacturing, with little to show for it. Now, though, the U.S. has entered a new era on trade: Leaders of both parties have rejected the long-standing free-trade consensus and its penchant for offshoring jobs. Biden married that reshoring impulse with a desire to boost clean energy production, to both stimulate the economy and fight climate change.
This grand experiment remains in its infancy, and the success of the clean energy manufacturing revolution is by no means guaranteed. Cheap imports could outcompete even newly subsidized American products.
And if Republicans win the presidency and retake Congress, they’ve threatened to stop subsidizing low-carbon energy resources and instead double down on fossil fuel production. House Republicans — including Dalton’s representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have voted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to repeal the domestic manufacturing incentives in the IRA. (Greene’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
“Donald Trump and his Republican allies promised to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he’s reelected, so there’s a lot at stake here,” Representative Nikema Williams, who leads the Georgia Democrats, told me.
Since the IRA passed, Georgia has received $23 billion in clean energy factory investment, much of it flowing to northwest Georgia. I wanted to see what impact this is having on communities formerly hit hard by industrial decline, so I followed the money trail to Dalton earlier this summer.
I found a population that seems to like having advanced solar manufacturing in their backyard. Dalton’s solar jobs are boosting wages, invigorating the historic town center, and employing local high school graduates. Those benefits are starting to spread to nearby communities, where new solar factories are springing to life. In November, voters will weigh two very different visions of America’s energy future on the ballot, but Dalton is already reaping the rewards from slotting solar into its storied history of industrial production.
Both CSX and Norfolk Southern run Class I rail lines through Dalton, a testament to its industrial legacy, and freight trains bellow day and night.
That legacy harks back to 1900, according to local historians, when Catherine Evans Whitener sold a hand-tufted bedspread from her front porch for $2.50. The cottage industry took off in this land of forested ridges and stream-crossed valleys, and over time, local factories consolidated into global carpeting giants Shaw Industries and Mohawk Industries.
“The carpet industry was born here,” Carl Campbell, executive director of economic development at the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce, told me when I visited the Chamber. The New Georgia Encyclopedia states that 80 percent of America’s tufted carpet production happens within 100 miles of Dalton.
The conference room where we spoke sported large-format aerial photographs of the major factories nearby: the largest Shaw site, 650,000 square feet; and the new Engineered Floors colossus, 2.8 million square feet.
“You feel like there’s enough carpet in that building to cover the whole world,” said Campbell, who grew up in Dalton.
Dalton employment numbers peaked at 80,200 in 2006, per the Chattanooga Times Free Press. But the Great Recession crushed the homebuilding industry, cratering demand for Dalton’s carpeting products.
Dalton “was a ghost town in 2011, nothing going on because everybody was hurting,” Campbell added. From June 2011 to June 2012, Dalton notched the dubious distinction of most jobs lost of all 372 metro areas surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By that point, one-quarter of Dalton’s pre-recession jobs had vanished, and unemployment surged to 12.3 percent.
Since then, the industry has recovered somewhat. Engineered Floors, Mohawk, and Shaw still dominate local employment, with some 14,000 jobs among them, Campbell said. Those companies have had to adapt to evolving consumer tastes, shifting from wall-to-wall carpets to hardwood and other flooring materials. They’ve also automated aspects of production, reducing the number of workers needed.
In the wake of the Great Recession, local leaders sought to diversify Dalton’s industry. The county acquired an undeveloped lot south of town, and Campbell later pushed to clear and level the site, so it was shovel-ready for some future tenant. When Trump’s solar tariffs kicked in, Campbell’s counterparts at Georgia’s Department of Economic Development sent Qcells his way.
Qcells showed up in February 2018, looking to spin up its first American solar-panel factory in less than a year. “Suddenly, we had exactly what they needed,” Campbell said.
Thus Dalton managed to bring in new industry to balance out its base of carpets and flooring. Qcells originally promised to invest $130 million and hire 525 people within five years, Campbell said.
“They did it in three months,” he added. “In terms of an economic development project, they check all the boxes: Everything they said they would do, they did it faster than they said they would do it.”
When I asked folks around town what they thought of Qcells, they kept mentioning the dozens of air-conditioning units arrayed on the factory roof, like a field of doghouses, easily visible from I-75. I later learned that Qcells brought in helicopters to install those units, which made for a bit of small-town spectacle. Still, it struck me as a surprising detail to dwell on for a business that somehow turns the sun’s rays into cheap, emissions-free electricity.
Once I crossed Qcells’ sizzling parking lot and stepped indoors, it started to make sense. Georgia gets hot, and carpet factories get hot, but the vast floors of the twin solar factories are quite literally cool places to work.
The climate control is not unique to assembling solar panels, but it is required for the sensitive, precisely calibrated product. The air conditioners are but one sign that high-tech manufacturing has arrived, and that it makes for pretty comfortable work.
I met my two tour guides, Wayne Lock and Alan Rodriguez, in the factory lobby, and they quickly confirmed the physical appeal of Qcells jobs. Lock, now a quality engineer at Qcells, previously worked in carpet manufacturing; he had to wear special heat-resistant gear to handle carpeting materials that would otherwise deliver third-degree burns. Rodriguez, an engineering supervisor at Qcells, used to apply the coating material underneath carpets.
“You’re sandwiched between the steamer and the oven, so it gets quite hot,” Rodriguez told me. Attending to those machines exposed him to temperatures that could exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Even more than Qcells’ air conditioning, though, people I spoke to kept bringing up the pay.
By offering more for zero-skill, entry-level positions than the other factories in town, Qcells started attracting workers and pushed up wages across Dalton, Campbell said: “Competition brings everybody, so everybody’s had to kind of equalize to keep employees.”
Now Qcells hourly wages for non-experienced hires start at $17.50 to $22 — that amounts to $36,400 to $45,760 a year for full-time work. Workers with experience in robotics and manufacturing can take home much more than that. Employees can raise their pay through a variety of on-the-job training, most of which involves handling and troubleshooting the in-house fleet of robots.
Lock, Rodriguez, and I walked into the newest factory, past meeting rooms with names like Naboo and Mandalore, Star Wars locales where quirky robots coexist with all manner of creatures. As we strolled across the floor, squat wheeled autonomous vehicles rolled past us down pathways marked by tape on the smooth floor, ferrying bales of materials or hauling out hulking boxes of finished panels.
“We try to stay out of their way, and if we don’t, they yell at us,” said Lock. “It’s fun.”
As we stood talking, I noticed that one such robo-buggy was waiting for us to move. Barely discernible over the background drone of machines, a female voice intoned, “Robot is moving. Please look out.” When humans hold up more time-sensitive deliveries, Lock explained, the voice switches to male and gets louder.
Other robots remain fixed in place, carrying out repetitive precision tasks. I stared, mesmerized, at one machine that split wafer-thin silicon cells in half, first scoring them with a laser, then slicing them with a concentrated jet of water. A taller machine grabbed nearly 8-foot metal frames and sliced them through the air like a master swordsman in a Kurosawa film, to slot them around glassed-in silicon panels.
Throughout the process, cameras scan cells and use artificial intelligence to shunt defective items off the line for manual correction.
In the 2019-era factory next door, humans carry out many of these tasks. Lock, though, didn’t see the robots as competitors — he said they were taking on more physically demanding jobs so the humans could step into higher-skilled roles tending to robots.
“The ergonomics are better for you,” he said, and the new lines are more productive.
When Qcells was first staffing up, it relied on Quick Start, a Georgia state program that funds worker training for new factories before they open — a major draw for executives deciding where to locate their factories.
Qcells still recruits to meet ongoing staffing needs, and it has been paying special attention to high schoolers who are graduating and looking for employment. Nash speaks passionately about Qcells’ recruitment efforts; she’s seen the civic fallout from decades when local families encouraged kids to avoid manufacturing.
“Small communities cannot thrive with kids graduating and leaving those communities to live elsewhere, to get high-paying technical jobs,” Nash said. “That’s what’s happening across the country. Bringing manufacturing back, and bringing highly automated manufacturing, is offering job opportunities where now these students are staying here.”
Some 56 percent of Dalton-area students enroll in postsecondary education within 16 months of graduating high school, said Stephani Womack, director of education and workforce development for the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce. For the remainder, the chamber wants to make sure family-supporting jobs are available.
For two weeks in June, Womack helped run Project Purpose, a crash course in how to start and navigate careers that pay living wages. Recent high school graduates prepped for interviews, shopped for professional clothes, and toured housing options and downtown hotspots — the kinds of places they could frequent once they join the workforce.
But the centerpiece of the program amounted to professional speed dating, as Dalton’s major employers offered tours and entry-level jobs. Last year, Dalton’s first time running Project Purpose, seven young adults completed the program, and Qcells hired one of them. This time, 18 finished, and Qcells hired 12 of them to start on July 1.
“Next year, we hope to double that, or more,” Nash said.
Several participants came in knowing about Qcells, betting that the intensive crash course would increase their odds of landing good roles there, Womack told me over a table at Garmony House, a downtown coffee shop that draws lines for its statuesque strawberry cupcakes and coffee-glazed cinnamon rolls.
“Qcells is providing a diverse set of options for our students who need to go to work but want to stay in our community,” Womack said. “They see a climate-controlled facility with entry-level opportunities — that’s exciting for them. … Manufacturing isn’t what it used to be.”
For younger people to stay in town and build a life, Dalton needs more housing, and now it’s getting its first large apartment complex in over two decades, Campbell said. In total, 900 apartment units are slated to come online from last August through this November — not enough to catch up on a long-running housing deficit, but a step in the right direction.
That renewed real estate activity is reflected in downtown Dalton’s bustling core.
Locals pack the booths at the Oakwood Cafe, perhaps the only place in America that sells a platter of egg, sausage, toast, and grits for just $3.65. Multiple microbreweries beckon, as does a plush cocktail bar, the Gallant Goat, which stocks fresh mint by the fistful to garnish its drinks. Down the road, diners can sample ceviche of shrimp shipped in from coastal Mexico, succulent chicken wings, and high-end Southern cuisine.
This spring, the plush Carpentry Hotel opened across from the Oakwood Cafe, decked out with vibrant textile art to commemorate the town’s carpeting heritage.
“That’s been big for us, getting that hotel in downtown. That’s indicative of a robust local economy that people are coming to participate in,” local real estate agent Beau Patton told me as the late afternoon sun streamed into the Gallant Goat. Patton works with Qcells employees who want to buy homes in the area. He sees the factory’s decision to locate there as “very mutually beneficial” for Qcells and Whitfield County: “What you hope is Whitfield County grows with it, and it grows with Whitfield County.”
Dalton got in early on the national clean-energy factory revival, and has already seen its solar factory push up wages, enable high school graduates to stay and start careers, and inject money into a reinvigorated downtown. Many more communities in Georgia are following close behind with their own cleantech factories, seeking a similar economic jolt.
“There is a palpable and intense sense of excitement across the state about how these manufacturing and infrastructure policies are supercharging Georgia’s economic development,” said Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat who authored the IRA manufacturing incentives that Qcells is tapping into. “And I would add, it’s not just the primary industrial facilities; it’s all of the secondary and tertiary suppliers and vendors and service companies and the financial services firms needed to support them.”
Qcells is building an even bigger factory compound down in Cartersville, which won a conditional $1.45 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy on August 8. This facility will take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits to onshore more steps of the solar supply chain: slicing silicon wafers, carving them into solar cells, and assembling finished modules with even newer robots than the ones I saw in Dalton. Until now, those high-value precursors to solar panels were shipped in from overseas. Workers in Dalton complete just the last step: assembling modules. Cartersville promises to bring the dream of American-made solar a bit closer to reality.
To achieve that dream, the industry has a few other challenges to confront. For one, 97 percent of the glass that encloses solar panels comes from China. Besides the geopolitical implications of that dependence, glass is so fragile and heavy that its shipping costs make domestic production enticing both economically and environmentally.
“We need domestic glass to have an efficient supply chain,” said Suvi Sharma, founder and CEO of solar recycling startup Solarcycle. His company is breaking ground on a combination solar-panel recycling facility and solar-glass factory in Cedartown, some 70 miles southwest of Dalton. Sharma expects to invest $344 million in the community and hire 600 full-time employees.
Compared with Dalton and Cartersville, “Cedartown is more off the beaten path — this would be the first large-scale factory going up there,” said Sharma. After years in which the population declined and young people looked elsewhere for jobs, “this enables them to keep people and bring in more people. There’s a cascading impact.”
Solarcycle will use its rail spur to ship in low-iron silica from a mine in Georgia, plus soda ash and limestone. Over time, it will supplement those raw ingredients with increasing amounts of glass the company will pull from decommissioned solar panels, including those made by Qcells. The goal is to produce enough glass for 5 gigawatts of panels per year; Solarcycle will ship the glass to nearby customers. At that point, workers in northwest Georgia will have a hand in all the major steps of solar-module production except the processing of raw polysilicon. Hanwha recently became the largest shareholder in REC Silicon to secure access to domestic polysilicon from the Pacific Northwest.
Georgia also nabbed a hefty chunk of the electric-vehicle factory buildout catalyzed by IRA incentives. Hyundai is dropping nearly $1 billion on its “Metaplant” near the deepwater port of Savannah and building an adjacent $4.3 billion battery plant with LG. Kia erected a new EV9 SUV manufacturing line at its plant in West Point, about halfway down Georgia’s border with Alabama. The first EV9 rolled off the line in June — less than two years after the IRA was signed into law.
Dalton, then, is a leading indicator of the industrial invigoration that clean energy factories are bringing to cities and towns across Georgia. People broadly appreciate it — if not for the role in combating climate change or countering China’s industrial might, then for high starting wages, comfortable working conditions, and opportunities for advancement.
But for this nascent factory boom to endure, the policies that triggered it need to stay in effect. The people of Georgia played a decisive role in spurring this manufacturing revival; this November, they’ll have an outsize role in deciding if it continues.
BUILDINGS: The U.S. EPA grants $450 million to a coalition of five New England states to encourage heat pump adoption, aiming for 65% of home heating and air conditioning sales by 2030. (Canary Media)
ALSO:
GRID:
CLEAN ENERGY: Some Pennsylvania businesses say state and federal requirements are making it difficult for them to get involved in clean energy manufacturing, like a Meadville glass maker that wants to hire at least 120 workers to make solar panel glass. (Environment + Energy Leader)
TRANSPORTATION: In New York, two lawsuits aim to revive the Manhattan traffic congestion tolling program, with one claiming the governor’s indefinite pause is an unlawful use of her powers and another making a constitutional law argument. (Sierra)
LEGISLATION: New Hampshire’s governor signs several energy-related laws, including nuclear power studies, renaming an offshore wind office, and rules around involuntary retirement or decommissioning of power generation assets. (InDepth NH)
WORKFORCE: Pennsylvania’s Bucks County Community College receives a $2 million federal grant to invest in a clean energy HVAC technician program and expand a manufacturing apprenticeship. (WHYY)
WIND: As Maine seeks to put an offshore wind port on an undeveloped island that conservationists want to preserve, a reporter does a flyover of the Sear’s Island and Mack Point area to get a bird’s eye view of the current land uses. (Maine Monitor)
COMMENTARY: Massachusetts lawmakers need to reconvene their session to pass a consensus climate bill — which includes project permitting reform — or otherwise “pay a steep price” for the lack of climate action, writes the Northeast Clean Energy Council’s president. (CommonWealth Beacon)
HYDROGEN: Oregon advocates push back against a utility’s pilot project blending hydrogen into its natural gas distribution system in Portland, joining other critics around the region citing safety concerns, high costs and limited effectiveness at decarbonization. (Oregon Capital Chronicle, Floodlight)
UTILITIES: California Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes legislation aimed at lowering electricity bills, but has yet to disclose details. (Sacramento Bee)
GRID:
OIL & GAS:
GEOTHERMAL:
EMISSIONS:
POLITICS: A debate over the domestic uranium industry’s predicted revival dominates a Utah legislative race in the southeastern part of the state. (KJZZ)
STORAGE: Developers bring a 400 MW battery energy storage system online in southern California. (The Sun)
COMMENTARY:
HYDROGEN: Advocates worry proposed federally incentivized green hydrogen production facilities in Arizona and other arid states will further deplete already strained water supplies. (Floodlight)
GRID:
UTILITIES: Nevada regulators propose allowing NV Energy to stop charging a single statewide disaster preparedness rate so customers in the southern part of the state will not subsidize wildfire prevention in the north. (Nevada Current)
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: An Idaho sanitation company replaces its diesel-fueled garbage collection fleet with electric trucks. (Idaho Statesman)
OIL & GAS:
SOLAR:
ELECTRIFICATION: Berkeley, California’s city council votes to approve a ballot initiative that would tax large buildings that use natural gas-fueled appliances. (Daily Californian)
CLIMATE: An investigation finds Nevada officials continued to offer contracts to a startup even after its carbon emissions tracking system failed to perform as promised. (ProPublica)
POLITICS: U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Wyoming Republican, proposes removing Boulder, Colorado’s gas stations and streets, citing the progressive city’s efforts to fight climate change. (WyoFile)
BIOFUELS: A southern California city plans to upgrade its wastewater treatment plant to produce biofuels from organic waste and sewage sludge. (news release)
FINANCE: A new U.S. Treasury analysis finds that almost 160,000 Pennsylvanians claimed more than 260 million in Inflation Reduction Act tax credits on their 2023 taxes for clean energy and efficiency improvements. (Environment America)
BATTERIES:
TRANSPORTATION: While a New York City deputy mayor says officials aren’t “waiting on congestion pricing” to limit emissions and fund transit projects, she notes that the city won’t do a full analysis on how to course correct until after a final decision is made on the fate of the program. (City & State)
CARBON CAPTURE: Some Pennsylvania environmentalists want lawmakers to repeal recently signed legislation that outlines a regulatory framework for the carbon capture industry, saying the technology’s climate-mitigating potential is overstated. (EHN, Capital & Maine)
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WIND:
BIOENERGY:
GRID: Central Maine Power says it will route one of four New England Clean Energy Connect power line converter station transformers from Auburn to Lewiston on Thursday evening. (Sun Journal)
OIL & GAS: Some drillers in Texas’ Permian Basin are paying buyers to take their excess supply because they’re producing so much natural gas they’ve exceeded available storage space and pipeline capacity. (New York Times)
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COAL:
GRID: Louisiana residents complain to local and state officials about frequent outages in an area managed by Entergy. (WVUE)
UTILITIES:
CLIMATE: As Tropical Storm Debby swamps the Carolinas, causing widespread outages and threatening a Georgia dam, experts say climate change is making tropical cyclones even worse. (Charleston Post and Courier, The State, WAGA, Inside Climate News)
BUILDINGS: A technology company experiments with using Virginia dredging waste as an ingredient in concrete to lower its carbon footprint and make a stronger product. (Virginia Mercury)
STORAGE: An Oklahoma fire department posts a video of a dog sparking a fire by chewing on a lithium-ion battery to its Facebook page as a warning to residents. (Associated Press)
EFFICIENCY:
COMMENTARY: West Virginia regulators’ push to prop up coal is harming state residents and their pocketbooks, writes an environmental policy analyst. (West Virginia Watch)
NUCLEAR: Tech companies increasingly seek to directly connect data centers to nuclear plants, a concept that has drawn opposition from some utilities that claim it would harm other ratepayers. (Canary Media, CNBC)
POLITICS:
RENEWABLES:
SOLAR:
ELECTRIC VEHICLES: The market slowdown around electric vehicles causes concern about the sector’s leading role in Georgia’s manufacturing renaissance, which one state official has called the state’s second industrial revolution. (Atlanta Business Chronicle)
WIND: Despite the depiction of toppled wind turbines in this summer’s sequel to “Twister,” researchers say turbines are generally built to withstand extreme winds and tornadoes. (E&E News)
MANUFACTURING: Around 40% of the largest manufacturing investments announced in the year after the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act have since been delayed due to market conditions and uncertainty around the next presidential administration, a news organization’s analysis finds. (Financial Times, subscription)
CARBON CAPTURE: A California nonprofit finds state plans to capture and sequester 50 million tons of carbon dioxide would require about 1,150 miles of new pipelines and other infrastructure. (Capital & Main)
Darryl Moton is ready to “get on a roof.”
The 25-year-old Chicago resident is among the latest graduates of an intensive 13-week solar training course that’s helping to connect employers with job candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.
Moton was referred by another job readiness program meant to keep youth away from gun violence. He “never knew about solar” before but now sees himself owning a solar company and using the proceeds to fund his music and clothing design endeavors.
He and others interviewed for jobs with a dozen employers assembled at a church on Chicago’s West Side on August 1 as part of the fourth training cohort for the 548 Foundation, which is partnering with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on a recently-announced $30 million initiative to create 1,000 solar jobs in Chicago’s South and West side neighborhoods.
The 548 Foundation is part of 548 Enterprise, a suite of renewable energy and affordable housing development projects, launched in 2019 and named after the public housing unit where co-founder A.J. Patton grew up.
The idea is to help keep housing affordable by using solar to lower energy bills, while training people left out of the traditional energy economy to supply that solar.
“When you invest in a community, the biggest question is who benefits, who gets the jobs?” asked Patton, during the job fair. “This is as good as it gets,” he added, about the recent state investment. “We just have to keep advocating for quality policy.”
Employers at the job fair said such training programs are crucial for them to find workers in Illinois, where robust solar incentives are attracting many out-of-state companies eager to hire and hit the ground. Mike Huneke, energy operations manager for Minnesota-based Knobelsdorff said he has hired 18 employees from previous 548 cohorts, and he expected to make about six job offers after the recent interviews.
“Illinois is on fire,” said Huneke. “We’re not from Illinois, so finding this new talent pipeline is what we need. We have a ton of projects coming up.”
Lisa Cotton, 30, has dreamed of being an electrician since she was a kid. She had received two job offers at the August 1 fair before the group even broke for lunch.
“A lot of times you go through a training program, get a certificate, and that’s the end of it,” said Jacqueline Williams of the Restoring Sovereignty Project, a partner which administers the wraparound services for the training program.
The 548 program makes sure to connect graduates with employers, and only companies with specific openings to fill are invited to the job fair. 548 and its partners also stay in contact with graduates and employers to make sure the placement is successful.
“We have a post-grad program where they can call us any time, and an alumni fund. If an employer says, ‘This guy can’t come to work because his radiator is busted,’ we’ll take care of that,” said Williams.
After Illinois passed an ambitious clean energy law in 2017, multiple solar training programs were launched in keeping with the law’s equity provisions. But employers and advocates were frustrated by a seeming disconnect in which many trainees never got solar jobs, and employers weren’t sure how to find the workers.
Since then, the state has passed another clean energy law – the 2021 Climate & Equitable Jobs Act, with even more ambitious equity mandates; and non-profit organizations have developed and honed more advanced workforce training programs. To access incentives under the law, employers need to hire a percent of equity-eligible applicants that rises to 30% by 2030. The program prioritizes people impacted by the criminal justice system, alumni of the foster care system, and people who live in equity-designated communities.
548 affiliates help employers navigate the paperwork and requirements involved in the equity incentives. Several employers at the job fair said this is a plus, but noted that regardless of equity, they are desperate for the type of highly-trained, enthusiastic candidates coming out of the 548 program.
“This is a great way to bridge what the state is trying to do with its clean energy goals, and connecting under-represented people with these opportunities,” said Annette Poulimenos, talent acquisition manager of Terrasmart, a major utility-scale solar provider. “We came here ready to hire, and I think we’re going to walk away with some new talent.”
Member organizations of the Chicago Coalition for Intercommunalism do outreach to recruit most of the training program participants.
Nicholas Brock found out about the training thanks to a staffer at one of these organizations who noticed his professional attitude and punctuality as he walked by every morning to a different workforce program.
“Whatever I do, nine times out of 10, I’m the first one to get there, before the managers,” said Brock, 20. “He noticed that and asked me, ‘Have you ever heard about solar panels?’”
Brock knew little about solar at that point, but now he aims to be a solar project manager.
“I’m so glad I came here,” he said. “They bring out the best in you.”
Wraparound, holistic services are key to the program’s success. During the training and for a year afterwards, trainees and alumni can apply for financial help or other types of assistance.
“There are so many barriers, it might be child care or your car is impounded,” said Williams. “We might be writing a letter to a judge asking to ‘please take him off house arrest so he can work.’ It’s intensive case management, navigating the bureaucratic anomalies that arise when you’re system-impacted.”
Moises Vega III, 26 – who always wanted to work in renewables because “it’s literally the future” – noted that his car battery died during the training program, and he was provided funds to get his vehicle working again.
While ample support is available, the program itself is rigorous and demanding. Classes meet from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day, and trainees are required to check their phones at the door and be fully focused, notes instructor and 548 workforce strategies director Michael Thomas. During the hands-on boot camp week, the day starts at 6 a.m.
“That’s when the trades start,” noted Thomas. “You need to figure out how that works, how will you get child care at 5:30 a.m.?”
Sixty-one trainees started in the first three cohorts, and 46 graduated, the first group in July 2023. The fourth cohort started with 25, and as of the job fair, 18 were on track to graduate. Eighty-five percent of graduates from the first three cohorts are currently working in the field, according to 548.
“Even though I wish the graduation rate were higher, the people who commit to it, stay with it,” said Kynnée Golder, CEO of Global HR Business Solutions, which has an oversight role for the 548 Foundation. “It’s monumental, it’s life-changing for a lot of people.”
The curriculum starts with life skills, including interpersonal relationships, resume-building, financial planning and more. Each day begins with a spiritual reflection.
The students learn about electricity and energy, and soon move into specific instruction on solar installation and operation. Rooms at St. Agatha’s church served as labs, where students connected wires, built converters and eventually mounted solar panels on a demonstration pitched, shingled roof.
Terrance Hanson, 40, credited Thomas as “the best instructor ever.”
“I’m not a young kid, my brain is no longer a sponge,” Hanson said. “He made sure I got it all. Now I feel like I know so much, I’m confident and prepared to get out and show what I can do.”
He added that people in disinvested neighborhoods have ample untapped potential to be part of the clean energy workforce.
“You see a lot of basketball players in my community because there are a lot of basketball hoops,” he said. “If there were golf courses in the hood, you would see more golfers. It’s about opportunities. And this was the most amazing and empowering thing I’ve ever been through.”
Jack Ailey co-founded Ailey Solar in 2012, making it the oldest still-operating residential installer in Illinois, by his calculations. He noted that there can be high turnover among installers, and intensive training and preparation is key.
“You’re out there in the sun, the cold, it’s heavy physical labor, wrestling 40-pound panels up to the roof,” he said. “You have to know what you’re getting into.”
“Some training programs vary in quality,” Ailey added, but he was impressed by the candidates at the 548 job fair.
Trainees test for and receive multiple certifications, including the OSHA 30 for quality assurance, and the NCCER and NABCEP for construction and solar professionals, respectively. The program is also a pre-apprenticeship qualifier, allowing graduates to move on to paid, long-term apprenticeships with unions representing carpenters, electricians, plumbers and laborers – the gateway to a lucrative and stable career in the trades.
Thomas noted that most trade unions still don’t have a major focus on solar.
“We’re ahead of the unions, and our graduates bring real value to them, and to the companies,” he said. “The students might know more than a company’s foreman knows. It’s a win-win situation. Solar is a nascent industry, there’s so much opportunity in this space.”
When Tredgett Page, 38, connected with 548, his auto detailing work and other odd jobs were not going well. He had always loved science and been curious about photosynthesis and the sun’s power.
“I had been in the streets before, and I was leaning back toward that, but God brought me here,” he said. “Now I have the confidence, I know what I’m talking about, I know about megawatts and kilowatts, net metering, grid-connected, pretty much anything about solar.”
He sees metaphorical significance in his new trade: “Energy is life, and it teaches you balance, it’s all about negative and positive ions.” He feels like “the sky is the limit” after the training.
“I have so much skill that they gave me, now I’m hungry to use it,” he said. “I’m a little nervous, but optimistic, excited, very exuberant!”
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