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A quaint northerly outpost of Napa Valley wine country, Calistoga has struggled to keep the lights on when wildfires strike the region. Now it’s got a brand-new microgrid to run the whole town for days on end without any onsite fossil fuels, just batteries and liquid hydrogen.

After disastrous conflagrations in 2017 and 2018, utility Pacific Gas & Electric began preemptively shutting off power lines to avoid sparking fires amid dangerously dry, windy conditions. “We were the first community in all of PG&E’s network that was getting our power shut off to protect us,” says Calistoga City Council member Lisa Gift. ​“By 2019 we were one of the first communities to have a microgrid in all of PG&E’s network, and that was being powered by diesel generators.”

PG&E arranged a bank of truck-based diesel generators to sit in the town during fire season. When the utility cut grid power, the generators kicked on, belching smoke in a particularly beloved pocket of the 5,000-person community. “We’re a small town, so they would come up and they’d be polluting the environment, taking up our dog park – loud, gross, noisy,” Gift recalls.

Now the diesel generators are gone and the park has been turned back over to Calistoga’s canine companions.

Community microgrids are the future of the energy system.

– Craig Lewis, executive director, Clean Coalition

On a slim parcel of city land next door, publicly traded energy-storage company Energy Vault installed lithium-ion batteries and a 234-foot, reinforced-steel tank for liquid hydrogen (designed to withstand a roaring fire, should it ever come to that) that runs a bank of hydrogen fuel cells.

Altogether, this compound should be able to meet Calistoga’s electricity needs without any power from the broader grid. It’s contracted to produce up to 8.5 megawatts for 48 hours, whenever PG&E shuts off grid power because of fire concerns. Refilling the hydrogen tank could let it run for several days more.

Showcasing a speculative technology

“Even though we’re taking elements – fuel cells, batteries, liquid hydrogen storage and distribution – that have been used before in commercial settings, they’re coming together for the first time as resiliency,” says Craig Horne, Energy Vault’s senior vice president for advanced energy solutions, in an interview before the project’s unveiling in early August.

Fans of hydrogen hail it as a solution to just about any entrenched decarbonization challenge, from heavy transport to steelmaking to on-demand power. But how hydrogen is produced makes a huge difference in its climate impact; seemingly clean sources can actually rack up major carbon emissions for negligible benefit.

For now, the clean hydrogen economy remains largely speculative, with hardly any truly clean hydrogen being produced or any real projects using it. Many planned clean hydrogen projects have vanished without a trace, following a short-lived boom fuelled by Biden-era support.

In Calistoga, Energy Vault has tapped hydrogen to deal with a very specific set of constraints – delivering energy without local emissions, over multiple days, in a tight footprint – but the cleanliness of that hydrogen is a more complicated issue than public descriptions of the microgrid suggest.

A high-stakes energy solution

The key players all have a lot riding on the project.

Energy Vault, which previously raised several hundred million dollars in a singular bid to store energy with multi-storey robotic cranes that stack blocks, wants to build a new long-duration storage business around this hydrogen microgrid showcase.

Plug Power, the financially challenged hydrogen company, points to Calistoga as its largest deployment of hydrogen fuel cells: a beefy eight megawatts, after 28 years of hard work.

And PG&E has orders from regulators to add more clean energy microgrids in communities where it regularly cuts off power. Calistoga was its first delivery on that directive, after a few years of soliciting proposals and a couple more years of permitting and construction. “Community microgrids are the future of the energy system,” says Craig Lewis, who advocates for such projects as executive director of the Clean Coalition non-profit. The Calistoga microgrid is ​“a commercial-scale experiment, and I’m grateful for it.”

The results of that experiment will take time to analyze. It could unleash a new, replicable model for premium-priced community-level backup power. Or the quirkiness of the design and the murkiness of hydrogen’s supply chain and emissions could make it a quixotic outlier of questionable climate value.

Power that’s cleaner and more compact

The Calistoga microgrid poses an answer to the question of how to provide a few days of backup power to a small town in a small space, without worrying too much about cost. The limitations drove the design, which turned out quite unlike anything built thus far. Energy Vault had to figure out how to pack 293 megawatt-hours of storage into just two-thirds of an acre. The lot used to hold debris from city works, like old bits of sidewalk and pipes, Horne says.

Lithium-ion batteries have proven themselves capable of storing power, be it as a Powerwall in someone’s garage or as a large-scale grid storage facility. But to store nearly 300 megawatt-hours, grid battery enclosures need more acreage than was available to lease from the city. Even if enough batteries could fit, the auxiliary power consumption for keeping them safely cooled would pose a challenge for a project that’s supposed to mostly sit around waiting for an emergency event.

Hydrogen gas can be liquefied by cooling it to ultra-low temperatures, which unlocks greater energy density. When converted back to gas and run through fuel cells, it produces a stream of electricity and no byproduct besides water vapour. That core technology powers hydrogen vehicles, though their cost and inconvenience make for a widely derided car-ownership experience.

At Calistoga, the hydrogen flows directly to six Plug Power GenSure 1540 fuel cells, boxy containers with cooling units stacked on top, making them about two storeys tall.

The engineers added a small lithium-ion battery (7.7 MW/11.6 MWh) to perform ​“black start,” the complicated and crucial task of rebooting an electrical system after a complete blackout, Horne notes. The battery also buffers the output of the system while the hydrogen gets up and running. Then the power flows to Calistoga’s grid, which, when PG&E shuts off the transmission lines, will be fully islanded from the surrounding network.

The hydrogen is stored onsite in an 80,000-gallon tank, manufactured in Minnesota by Chart Industries. The tank holds enough to power the fuel cells for about two days, but Energy Vault will try its best to keep the lights on beyond the contracted timeframe, Horne says. So the company made sure the tank can be refuelled while it’s in active use. “The task is to squeeze toothpaste into a toothpaste tube that was being squeezed,” Horne says. ​“That’s what we proved in our acceptance testing, running for multiple hours while the fuel cells were running and a tank trailer here in the driveway is pushing liquid hydrogen into the tank itself.”

How clean is ‘clean hydrogen’?

The microgrid’s promise as a clean energy breakthrough, of course, hinges on the supply of clean hydrogen, but supply chains are barely getting started. Almost all commercial hydrogen is currently made from methane gas, a fossil fuel, through a procedure called steam methane reforming that sends the carbon dioxide byproduct straight into the atmosphere.

For hydrogen to stake any claim as a climate solution, it needs to be made without massive carbon emissions. That usually involves an alternative production method called electrolysis, which separates hydrogen from water using electricity. But this method can produce even more emissions than the dirty methane version if the electrolyzers are drawing power from the grid rather than dedicated renewable sources like solar and wind.

Energy Vault describes the hydrogen it’s using in Calistoga as ​“clean,” which Horne clarified as meeting the federal standard of no more than four kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per kilogram of hydrogen produced. But he declined to name the source. Notably, California has subsidized hydrogen fuelling stations for more than a decade but still hasn’t managed to develop a clean hydrogen supply in-state. So for Calistoga’s hydrogen to be clean, it must be coming from somewhere else.

We can do more and waste less, and so that’s how we can be more cost effective.

– Craig Horne, senior vice president for advanced energy solutions, Energy Vault

During a tour of the microgrid, Deepesh Goyal, vice president of stationary power at Plug Power, told Canary Media that Plug Power currently supplies hydrogen from its electrolyzer site in Georgia, which runs on grid power. More than half of Georgia’s electricity comes from fossil fuels, so that electrolysis incurs substantial power-plant emissions. Plug Power buys credits for clean energy supply to compensate for this, Goyal says.

To meet the highest federal standard for clean hydrogen, producers need to obtain clean power matched to their consumption on an hourly basis in the areas where they operate. Plug Power did not respond in time for publication to questions clarifying what type of credits it buys. But a spokesperson for Energy Vault told Canary Media that currently there aren’t any facilities that could supply Calistoga with liquid hydrogen from electrolysis powered by time-matched, dedicated clean electricity, and the earliest such facility is targeting completion in 2026.

Goyal also says some of Calistoga’s hydrogen comes from an unnamed partner in Las Vegas that uses renewable natural gas (RNG) as its feedstock. As it happens, legacy gas supplier Air Liquide opened a steam methane reformer in that area a few years ago to serve California’s demand. Air Liquide says it can substitute RNG for the usual methane, which would make the resulting hydrogen carbon-negative according to the convoluted calculations of California’s clean-fuels bureaucracy.

It’s still hydrogen made by splitting methane and releasing carbon dioxide, but it looks good on paper thanks to controversial rules that privilege certain politically connected providers of RNG.

A climate solution that’s less than ideal

If someone were to design a climate solution from a blank slate, they probably wouldn’t run electrolyzers on grid power in Georgia in order to load the super-cooled hydrogen onto diesel-powered tankers and haul it more than 4,500 kilometres to Northern California, where it will sit around almost every day awaiting a utility power outage. “We still have to truck in that hydrogen,” Gift says. ​“That’s not ideal, but we were trucking in the diesel, and we were trucking in the diesel sometimes three times a day and burning that diesel.”

One incontrovertible fact is that the microgrid doesn’t combust anything onsite, so the operations within the fenceline emit almost no carbon emissions and don’t affect air quality. But it will be hard to gauge the real climate impacts of such a project until a more verifiably clean and geographically localized hydrogen supply chain develops.

Several companies have said they will build truly green hydrogen production in the coming years. That task has grown only more difficult with the Trump administration’s efforts to thwart renewables development and vastly curtail clean hydrogen tax credits.

Confronting the outsized costs of liquid hydrogen backup

The other make-or-break variable for hydrogen-backed resilience is how much it costs. Liquid hydrogen is an expensive, specialty fuel produced by only a handful of suppliers in the United States, and clean liquid hydrogen is even rarer.

For this first project, Energy Vault didn’t need to worry about consumer price sensitivity. The city of Calistoga isn’t paying Energy Vault for backup power: PG&E is paying the company to provide this service, out of funds socialized across the utility customer base. In fact, Calistoga is making some money, since Energy Vault leased the land from the municipality for 10 years.

The project’s total price tag has not been made public. Regulators allocated up to US$46.3 million for PG&E to spend on the endeavour. Energy Vault closed $28 million in project financing this spring to support construction. The company also said on Thursday that it has raised $300 million to launch Asset Vault, a subsidiary that will build, own and operate storage projects, with Calistoga as one of two anchor properties.

Horne allows that the hydrogen microgrid costs more than diesel generators up front, but argues that it can be competitive in terms of operating costs, given all the hassles associated with diesel. “We can do more and waste less, and so that’s how we can be more cost effective,” he says.

The regulatory authorization paints a different picture. The California Public Utilities Commission explicitly allowed PG&E to spend more money than the diesel generators cost in order to test a new model for cleaner resilience. “This project was supported by a CPUC plan that said we could build a solution that costs no more than twice what it would cost to deploy diesel generation over 10 years,” says Jeremy Donnell, a senior manager for microgrid strategy and implementation at PG&E. ​“It’s a bit of an arbitrary marker, but that’s what was laid out, and this project did come in under that threshold.”

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“But still, we have a ways to go to bring the cost down,” Donnell adds. ​“So hopefully, through implementation of this first project, Energy Vault learned a lot, the industry learned a lot on how to integrate these solutions in future projects.”

Energy Vault hopes to improve the project economics by upgrading the site to allow regular power exports to the grid.

Currently, the system is configured to push out power only when PG&E has scheduled a shutoff event; that means the microgrid sits idle almost every day of the year (and is unavailable for unforeseen outages, like if a tree falls on a key line). But with the right permissions and technical tweaks in place, Energy Vault expects to use the battery, and potentially even the hydrogen, to send power to California’s grid at particularly lucrative times.

“We can now have a viable second revenue stream outside of providing that resiliency service, without compromising our ability to provide the resiliency service,” Horne says. PG&E amended its contract this summer to clarify that Energy Vault is allowed to pursue this, provided it does not interrupt delivery of the required resilience services.

Going forward, Calistoga will serve as a showcase for Energy Vault’s new ​“H-Vault” product line, marketed as a high-tech option for long-duration clean energy needs. Hydrogen tanks will join gravity-based block stacking and conventional lithium-ion batteries as the company’s core offerings.

For the people of Calistoga, the project softens the upheavals of living through climate-change-induced extreme weather, without all the downsides of onsite fossil fuel combustion.

“Is it absolutely perfect? No,” Gift says. ​“But as a society, it is about making that next best right step. And for us in our community, this was that next best right step.”

For Energy Vault and the budding hydrogen industry, the next right step will be expanding hydrogen production that’s definitively low-emissions, and closing the 4,500-kilometre gap between supply and demand.

Julian Spector is a senior reporter at Canary Media. He reports on batteries, long-duration energy storage, low-carbon hydrogen and clean energy breakthroughs around the world.

Wendy Becktold contributed reporting from Calistoga.

The post A new California microgrid runs on hydrogen. But how clean is it? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The company’s board replaced the CEO and CFO in a decision announced May 1, when Li-Cycle publicized that it was looking for buyers. A potential deal with mining giant and lead creditor Glencore evidently had not come to fruition: Two weeks later, a Canadian bankruptcy court appointed Alvarez & Marsal Canada Securities to oversee a sale of Li-Cycle’s assets. A Li-Cycle spokesperson referred Canary Media to the company’s public bankruptcy announcements.

Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June. In the meantime, Glencore has loaned $10.5 million to keep things going during the proceedings. Glencore also entered a ​“stalking horse” offer of $40 million for most of Li-Cycle’s holdings, setting a floor for bidding (if any other investors want a piece of the action). Glencore could emerge with a real deal on its hands, but it won’t be recouping the $275 million it previously invested in Li-Cycle.

“The Company represents a compelling investment opportunity, uniquely positioned to benefit from rapid growth in the battery materials and [lithium-ion battery] recycling market, amid increasing global focus on sustainability and critical raw material supply chain resilience,” Alvarez & Marsal pitch in a flyer for the sale.

That ​“compelling” opportunity amounts to five battery shredding plants, a massive unfinished recycling centre in western New York, and a business predicated on the growth of a nascent North American EV supply chain that currently faces far-reaching disruption from the Trump administration. A buyer would not be able to fully recycle any batteries without spending a few hundred million dollars more, and even then, it’s not clear they would make any money doing so.

The start-up’s collapse underscores the struggles of the fledgling battery-recycling industry in general. A few years ago, the sector was flush with venture capital and charting out rapid timelines for commercializing breakthrough technologies that would enable the transition to EVs while minimizing mining. The sector was also seen as a way to achieve the bipartisan goal of reducing dependence on China, which dominates the global battery supply chain.

Li-Cycle was founded in Canada in 2016 and went public in 2021 through a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC (generally a red flag for early-stage cleantech companies). Its engineers developed a technique for shredding whole lithium-ion battery packs while they’re submerged in liquid; this prevented fires and saved considerable effort compared with painstakingly discharging and dismantling the packs for processing.

Li-Cycle successfully built five ​“spoke” facilities to collect and shred whole EV battery packs, turning them into the powdery mixture known as black mass. The spoke operations have paused in Arizona, Alabama, New York and Ontario, while a German outpost continues to function during bankruptcy proceedings. Collectively, these facilities can break down up to 40 kilotons of batteries a year.

The spokes were supposed to feed their black mass to Li-Cycle’s hub in Rochester, New York, which would refine it and isolate useful battery materials to reintroduce into the supply chain. This never came to pass because Li-Cycle halted construction in fall 2023, citing runaway costs. It became clear that Li-Cycle needed to find a lot more cash to complete the nearly two-million-square-foot site.

Prospective buyers for the partially completed recycling empire can state their intent by early June.

The company hoped for a lifeline from the Biden-era Department of Energy: in November, its Loan Programs Office finalized a $475-million loan for Li-Cycle to complete the recycling hub. But Li-Cycle never drew on that federal money because it couldn’t secure additional private funding to hold in reserve, as stipulated in the loan terms.

Li-Cycle is not the only battery recycling firm in a tough spot. Since last year, a number of challenges have beset the industry.

The adjacent U.S. EV sector has seen slower growth than expected, which has in turn reduced the urgency of building out a North American battery supply chain. Core battery materials like lithium, nickel and cobalt have plummeted in price, lessening the value of whatever recyclers might glean. And battery makers have increasingly turned to lithium iron phosphate, a cheaper alternative to nickel- and cobalt-based chemistries, further reducing the value of recycling these batteries.

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In the past year, a fire destroyed the largest battery-shredding plant in the United States, Interco’s Critical Mineral Recovery site in Missouri. Reno, Nevada–based Aqua Metals ran low on funds and laid off staff while it searched for financing to build a commercial-scale recycling line. Ascend Elements delayed construction of its flagship recycling plant in Kentucky, citing a customer’s decision to postpone buying the recycled materials. In March, Ascend cancelled plans to make cathode active materials in Kentucky to focus on precursor materials and lithium carbonate.

Redwood Materials is the rare bright spot. The venture by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel raised a couple billion dollars and has been building out a major compound in the desert outside Reno, not far from Tesla’s factory there. In 2024, Redwood Materials broke down 20 gigawatt-hours of batteries and earned $200 million in revenue from recycled materials.

The industry’s challenges come as the Trump administration says it aims to expand U.S. mineral supplies. Paradoxically, the administration has taken steps to undermine the fledgling U.S. EV and battery industries, which are the big drivers of demand growth for rare earth metals. The budget bill passed by the House last week would strip tax incentives for EV purchases and battery installations, weakening demand for the domestic supply chain that recyclers like Li-Cycle hoped to serve – and making the tough road for recycling firms even tougher.

This article was first published by Canary Media. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Read the original article here.

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“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 (all figures in USD) 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.

From carpets to solar

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% 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%.

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.”

Domestic solar manufacturing, by humans and robots

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.

Hiring local, spending local

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% 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.

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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.”

From Dalton to towns across Georgia

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% 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.

This article by Canary Media is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The post How a small city in Georgia became a solar manufacturing hub appeared first on Corporate Knights.

As global carbon emissions reached an all-time high, again, in 2019, the U.S. power sector offered the country’s sole glimmer of hope for hitting its climate targets. The rest of the economy released more greenhouse gas rather than less, except for the transportation sector, which cleaned up slightly.

Even that limited progress on clean electricity is perhaps surprising, given that the most recent dataset from a Corporate Knights’ Earth Index report comes from well into the presidency of Donald Trump, who rejected the Paris Agreement and vowed to revitalize coal power. But the president wields limited direct influence over a decentralized power industry. Coal plants kept closing, while renewables hit their stride.

Much has changed since 2019. President Joe Biden ran and won on a clean energy platform. He hasn’t yet been able to pass sweeping climate legislation, but he did declare that by 2030, U.S. emissions would fall as much as 52% from 2005 levels. That’s the goal the Earth Index tracks.

To succeed in less than nine remaining years, the U.S. must double down on clean electricity and convert it into emission reductions elsewhere, by electrifying transportation, buildings and some industrial processes.

Luckily for this effort, renewables have passed an inflection point in economic competitiveness: nearly half of new power plant capacity built in 2022 will be solar, according to federal data. Record numbers of battery plants are getting built to store solar power for nocturnal use. Overall, 79% of new capacity in 2022 will be non-fossil based. Nearly every major utility company pledged to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century. But modelling suggests that, without a federal push to close dirty plants and open more clean ones, the U.S. will fall short of its 2030 goal.

With power emissions falling, transportation is now the largest-emitting sector at 29% of U.S. emissions in 2019. The pathway there is fairly straightforward: build more chargers, electrify government and corporate fleets, and mass consumer adoption will follow as prices come down and options increase.

Electric vehicles trickled into the market in 2019. In 2021, they doubled market share to 4.5%, according to the International Energy Agency. That trend is set to keep growing, as electric offerings proliferate and classic brands like Ford’s F-150 pickup truck and Chevy’s Silverado launch battery-powered models.

Democrats failed to pass Build Back Better legislation, which included $500 billion to accelerate decarbonization. But last year’s infrastructure law directs billions of dollars to public charging networks, to give drivers more options to replenish their batteries around town or on highway corridors. Biden wants half of U.S. new car sales to be electric by 2030.

“The President’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will help us win the EV race by working with states, labor, and the private sector to deploy a historic nationwide charging network that will make EV charging accessible for more Americans,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement.

Long-distance trucking will likely need different technologies like hydrogen fuel cells, but electric can work for five million shorter routes in North America, based on industry testing.

Heavy industry looks more daunting. Few low-carbon options are commercially ready for energy-intensive processes like making steel, glass, cement and fertilizer. But steelmakers are already building factories for “green steel,” using cleanly produced hydrogen and electric furnaces. The issue isn’t so much inventing new technologies as scaling them to compete with conventional, carbon-emitting ones.

The agriculture and waste sectors are early in their decarbonization process and haven’t drawn much focus in national policy debates.

Another stubborn area: there’s an estimated 65 million existing homes that would need to switch from burning gas to all-electric.

A clean grid can’t halve national emissions by itself. Success by 2030 depends on how quickly other sectors tap into the transition to clean electricity.

Julian Spector is a senior reporter at Canary Media, a U.S.-based non-profit newsroom chronicling decarbonization.

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