Politics are tricky and exhausting — just about anyone could tell you that, especially in an election year where Georgia is again a battleground state.
Most politicians, however, can agree on a few things, at least in principle, and creating jobs is one of them. In fact, the United Nations agrees, too, with their Sustainable Development Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth.
According to a new report from Climate Power, a self-described independent strategic communications organization focused on “winning the politics of climate”, Georgia is, actually, the number one state to do business — clean energy related business, anyway.
The report looked at private sector clean energy announcements from August 16, 2022 — the date the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed — and May 31, 2024. It found that Georgia, along with Michigan, Texas, California and South Carolina, received the most new projects in the clean energy industry, with total projects including “173 new battery manufacturing sites, 137 new or expanded electric vehicle manufacturing facilities, and 166 solar and wind manufacturing plants.”
Specifically, the report says that Georgia has had 41 new projects in the aforementioned time period and benefited from 30,661 new jobs in that same time, with new investments totaling $23.88 billion. The bulk of those projects are filed under the “manufacturing” category. The full list can be found here.
It makes sense, really. More solar adoption means more people needed to work in the industry — developing panels, modeling systems, installation and maintenance. Likewise, a more EV-friendly market means EVs will continue to occupy a larger and larger market share of the automobile industry. With that, more charging stations, more mechanics able to work on electric cars, more specific EV parts and manufacturers, etc., are all needed. Even alternative mobility like e-bikes, which has a new program out of the City of Atlanta, will have a space in the clean energy market.
Beyond the flashy side of clean energy, though, is the less-outward facing but still critical work of energy efficiency. Buildings that contribute to nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions; increasing energy efficiency would be an ideal way of demanding less energy and overall reducing greenhouse gasses. The Inflation Reduction Act created pathways for states to introduce Home Energy Rebates for this exact reason — to spur investment in homes to save kilowatts that were lost rather than generating new ones through technology like solar.
Regardless of this, however, clean energy seems to have found a home in Georgia — because it works on multiple fronts. For environmentalists and those worried about the warming of the Earth, clean energy directly impacts the industries most responsible for a warming planet.
But the biggest reason clean energy seems likely to stay is because, if this report is any indication, investing in clean energy makes sense financially. The cost of solar panels vs their returns is finally at a point where they’re worth looking into for many people. Electric vehicles are not abnormal to see on the streets, and electric bikes have been championed in a new wave of urbanism sweeping the nation, calling for multimodal transportation systems. On a deeper look, we see new infrastructure needed to keep up with all of these developments, from the installers of solar systems to maintaining the EV charging points or even assembling the vehicles at new EV manufacturing plants.
Additionally, part of the Biden administration’s goal was the Justice40 Initiative, which looks to ensure that 40 percent of certain federal investments in climate, clean energy, affordable and sustainable housing, and other investments “flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.” According to this report, “267 new clean energy projects have been announced since the passage of the clean energy plan, bringing $111 billion in investment and 127,910 jobs to low-income communities across 37 states.” The report defined low-income communities as “counties or Census-designated places where the median household income is less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line.”
This would mean the 127,910 jobs out of the 312,000 jobs nationwide represent about 40 percent of the new jobs created since the passage of the IRA; the 267 projects out of 585 would amount to about 45 percent, and the $111 billion in investments to about 30 percent of the $361 billion. In short, while not exactly forty percent across the board, a sizable portion of investments flow into low-income communities.
Is it a case-closed, we’re all sold on clean energy? Not quite. Like any industry, it comes with growing pains. Politics protecting the systems of the past, like the continued halting of a popular net-metering program from Georgia Power, still suppress the potential growth of the sector.
What’s clear, however, is that clean energy is in full swing, and it would take a deliberate effort to halt it — efforts that could very well materialize. While there are plenty of winners in this new economy, the long-standing oil and gas industry stands to be a loser unless they switch over to renewables themselves.
So, switch to renewables then, right? Well, it’s not quite so simple.
While it is true that nearly every oil and gas company has made some sort of effort to branch out towards clean energy, one thing that becomes more difficult in the clean energy economy is control over the market. Having largely unchallenged control over power plants, how electricity is generated, rate structures, and more allows power companies to control the market effectively through the centralized grid.
With clean energy technologies like solar, the landscape shifts to a more decentralized structure, where even individual homeowners or communities can play a more active role in the generation of electricity. In short, power shifts away from those who have it.
And, of course, there’s simply the reality that it isn’t an overnight process to completely switch our electric grid to clean energy. In Georgia, for instance, we’ve recently welcomed the newest nuclear reactors in the world, Vogtle 3 and 4, to keep up with demand — at least according to the companies behind the project.
For better or worse, fossil fuels and natural gas will be a part of much of the power grid’s portfolio for the present, but the U.S. is looking to achieve their goal of 100 percent clean energy in the coming decades.
For Georgia, specifically, it remains to be seen if politics will shape the future of an industry booming with investments. The report found that “a bulk of the new clean energy projects are located in congressional districts represented by Republican members of the House of Representatives — totaling 181,996 new jobs and over $282.05 billion in investment across 321 clean energy projects in 146 Republican-held districts.”
That’s 321 of the 585 overall projects mentioned in the report. Moreover, Georgia has 12 projects in rural communities that largely vote Republican, with over 3,300 jobs created in these rural communities and $2,207,000,000 in investments thus far.
At the same time, residents may reject these jobs and new developments and call on their elected leaders to make deliberate efforts to halt this industry. Or, despite benefits for the economy, elected leaders may still choose to invest in oil and natural gas, as was the sentiment of Republican candidate for Senate Herschel Walker when he claimed that Georgia wasn’t ready for the green agenda and the state needed to “keep having those gas-guzzling cars.”
For better or for worse, the “green agenda” has largely been associated with the Democratic Party, and because of the nature of politics, has been met with opposition from the leader of the Republican Party, former President Donald Trump.
Will politics be the cause of a foot on the brakes for an otherwise economy rolling fast after the IRA? Only time will tell.
Author’s note: This column was updated on July 31 2024 to reflect a correction about electric vehicles.
I hope to see more positive news about the transition to clean energy in Georgia and across the country. This is a really helpful post. Thank you very much for sharing it for me and everyone to know.
There is a troubling misconception that conflates producing clean energy hardware (solar panels, batteries, and EVs) with having progressive energy policy, two related but entirely different characteristics. Since the state’s Public Service Commission recently approved Georgia Power’s profitable proposal for massive use of even more fossil-fuels to produce electricity in the years ahead, Georgia could become the national poster-boy for this chronic, misleading confusion. Under its bipolar policies, Georgia may attain America’s greatest green-energy hardware manufacturing capacity, while producing some of the country’s least clean-energy per capita.
The state’s energy-generation choices reflect utterly no sense of commitment to the nation’s goal of reducing heat-trapping emissions. In fact, Georgia’s plan for reducing climate emissions, submitted to EPA a year ago, was entitled “voluntary” and set no targets for reducing energy-sector emissions, despite nearly a third of the state’s greenhouse gases being released in producing electricity.
So, let’s focus on the unmet need for balance in both making green-energy products available and the rapid transition toward clean power, which means phasing-out the use of fossil-fuels. Both are needed for legitimate leadership in effective climate action, but Georgia is clearly failing on the energy-production side by using dirty power to produce and recharge EVs while regressively impeding the implementation of community and rooftop solar options.