With election on the horizon, Georgians consider future of green energy funds

“I’ve been having a blast, me and my team, learning and doing a lot of these projects,” Martin said. 

The entrepreneur partners with local company Cherry Street Energy through the Shine On Program. It trains people like him to add solar installation to their businesses, or make new companies altogether. 

Martin said solar has grown his business, and — it was a smooth transition. 

“It was just an easy transition to incorporate this particular service within my field of what I currently do,” Martin said. 

He’s hired even more employees and said he tries to show them that, even though it’s tough manual labor, these trade jobs can be stable, well-paying and long-lasting careers.

And right now, he said he is only working on municipal and city projects and could still expand to residential installation. 

“I haven’t even scratched the surface,” Martin said. 

And Do Everything Wonderfully isn’t the only one seeing this transformation. 

Michael Chanin, CEO of Cherry Street Energy, said the demand for renewable energy is only growing as municipalities, corporations and residents are planning to reach clean energy goals in the coming years. His company specializes in selling retail electricity to groups like municipalities, like Atlanta and Fulton County, as well as businesses like Delta Airlines and Gulfstream.

“What we know is that the built environment will incorporate renewable power on every structure that can support it,” Chanin said. “If this transition is to occur successfully, we need thousands more careers created.”

He said Cherry Street Energy is working to help develop solar installation businesses and also train the workforce doing installation and electrical jobs. Chanin says that through apprenticeships, the business is able to help people who are new to the industry entirely or transitioning job roles get all the skills they need to work these renewable energy jobs.

“The careers that we create are durable – sustainable power is something that we are going to continue to need […] These aren’t gigs,” he said.

Preparing the green workforce

Amelia Godfrey is a program director at the Southface Institute, a sustainable building nonprofit in Atlanta. She works on professional development and training, and says that green jobs aren’t new in Georgia, nor are they isolated to the big green manufacturing plants cropping up around the state. 

“A lot of it is changing or evolving within preexisting industries,” Godfrey said. 

She added that the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are super charging these roles, ranging from electricians to HVAC to construction.

Southface does a lot, from advocating for more sustainable building codes to professional development. Godfrey, who focuses on helping workers upskill or enter the field, notes that big federal money, like from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, are looking at three big categories: energy efficiency, renewable energy and electric vehicles.

Her organization works with the electrification and weatherization tax credits in the IRA that make homes and buildings use less electricity. 

“For developers, it’s often a lot easier for them to think in terms of tax credits,” she said. “This is not like a hundred dollars — this is several thousands of dollars per unit that they’re able to offset on the cost of their construction.”

Godfrey said they need workers to do the energy efficiency work and upgrades to get these credits. Southface is preparing workers to fill these roles by connecting them with training and credentialing programs.  

“It’s going to primarily fall under electric electricians, our Insulation Contractors, our HVAC contractors, and then our energy auditor networks,” Godfrey said. 

She said all these job skills and titles already exist, but the jobs themselves are changing. Plus, this is an aging workforce. She said part of what Southface is doing is figuring out how to attract new workers into the roles of folks preparing to retire. 

One of the benefits of these programs, Godfrey said, is that they are designed to roll over. With the tax credits, someone, like a homeowner, could claim tax credits for air sealing and insulation one year, solar panels the next year, battery storage the year after, and for an electric vehicle the year after — the IRA was built with time in mind.

Catherine Wolfram, an economist at MIT, said states like Georgia have already felt huge impacts from the BIL and IRA in their few years in affect. 

“A lot of the investments are being made in red congressional districts or red states,” she noted. 

However, proponents of these bills are worried about the upcoming election and what a Trump presidency might mean, given his poor track record on climate issues.

“They’re worried that even if they — if Congress and the president — don’t formally repeal the inflation Reduction Act, that they’ll just kind of slow walk getting the money out there,” Wolfram said. 

The IRA works by giving out tax credits over several years, so the amount expended will depend on how many people opt to use the tax credits—and they haven’t had that many years to do so yet. 

Vice President Kamala Harris has said she wants to build on the Biden Administration’s efforts to lower home energy costs and increase renewable energy. 

Trump has said he would pull back Inflation Reduction Act funds that haven’t been spent. 

“I think, on the one hand, the Republican lawmakers probably would like the political win to say that they’d repealed this signature bill of Biden’s,” Wolfram said. “On the other hand, the economic interests of their constituencies are definitely to keep the bill as is.” 

In Georgia, we’ve seen this tension. 

South Georgia U.S. representative Buddy Carter, who has the Hyundai Metaplant in his district, has been outspokenly critical of the Inflation Reduction Act. U.S. Representative Barry Loudermilk, whose district includes the Hanwha QCells manufacturing plant in Dalton, has also been critical of the IRA.

They co-penned, along with other Republican leaders, an op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2022 calling the IRA a “bad deal,” “full of empty promises,” and argued it punishes EV manufacturers in the state. 

However, Republicans are walking back some of their wholesale rejection.

In August, U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter co-signed a letter with 17 other republican legislators to urge U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson to “prioritize business as he considers efforts to get rid of or change the IRA.” 

They don’t agree with many other parts of the bill, but they concede that the Inflation Reduction Act has been really important in their states, especially for some of these big green manufacturing plants. 

Wolfram said that Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is set to expire in 2025, meaning taxes will be up for discussion.

“No matter who wins the presidency, Congress is going to be talking about taxes.”