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President Trump’s across-the-board tariffs on virtually all consumer and industrial goods the U.S. imports triggered a stock market meltdown last week and are fanning fears of recession. On top of that the move is likely to sharply jack up prices for solar panels, wind turbines and batteries, key elements of the renewable power boom the country is enjoying.
China, hit with a 34% tariff increase, is the world’s largest producer of those products, though in the case of solar cells and components, the U.S. is more reliant on imports from Southeast Asia. Trump’s tariffs of 46% on Vietnam, 36% on Thailand, 24% on Malaysia and 49% on Cambodia mean photovoltaic goods from those countries will soon be dramatically more expensive, discouraging new solar installations. And although imports of wind-related equipment have dropped since 2020, the industry remains reliant on turbine blades made by non-U.S. producers, according to Wood Mackenzie. Prior to last week’s announcement, it estimated Trump’s tariffs would boost the cost of new onshore wind projects by 7%.
Domestic manufacturing of clean energy products has been growing, though the scale is still a fraction of China’s and is unlikely to expand dramatically in the near term as the Trump Administration is also working to pull back or end funding for clean energy projects that flourished under his predecessor. That’s unfortunate as renewable energy accounted for a record 24% of U.S. electricity production last year.
“Tariffs require a strategic approach with clear timelines to allow continued certainty for the American people, businesses and our economy,” said Vanessa Sciarra, vice president of trade & international competitiveness for the American Clean Power Association. “The policy whiplash from these tariffs will ultimately undermine the ability to realize a domestic supply chain and will constrain efforts to deliver energy security and reliability for Americans.”
Trump’s strategy may be to use tariffs as a bargaining tool and begin to dial them back soon, but right now it looks like they’ll throw the clean energy boom of recent years off track.
The Big Read
The list of famous auto industry flops is long and storied, topped by stinkers like Ford’s Edsel and exploding Pinto and General Motors’s unsightly Pontiac Aztek crossover SUV. Even John Delorean’s sleek, stainless-steel DMC-12, iconic from its role in the “Back To The Future” films, was a sales dud that drove the company to bankruptcy. Elon Musk’s pet project, the dumpster-driving Tesla Cybertruck, now tops that list.
After a little over a year on the market, sales of the 6,600-pound vehicle, priced from $82,000, are laughably below what Musk predicted. Its lousy reputation for quality–with eight recalls in the past 13 months, the latest for body panels that fall off–and polarizing look made it a punchline for comedians. Unlike past auto flops that just looked ridiculous or sold badly, Musk’s truck is also a focal point for global Tesla protests spurred by the billionaire’s job-slashing DOGE role and MAGA politics. “It’s right up there with Edsel,” said Eric Noble, president of consultancy CARLAB and a professor at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California (Tesla design chief Franz von Holzhausen, who styled Cybertruck for Musk, is a graduate of its famed transportation design program). “It’s a huge swing and a huge miss.”
Hot Topic
You have a fast-growing fleet of robotaxis that are also electric vehicles. It’s several hundred now and will probably grow to thousands. What are the upsides and challenges?
There are a lot of upsides. From a sustainability perspective, obviously, these are cleaner. They’re quieter as well, which is a really great experience for our customers. And they’re actually cleaner to be around. You don’t get the same sort of emissions and things like that.
Operationally, electric platforms are much safer to deal with. We have people who are managing the operations in the background and EVs add another element of safety and are just a better working environment for our operators since they’re not working with dangerous fuels.
The challenge is the infrastructure. That’s a big piece that we’re really focused on building out, that electric [charging] infrastructure.
Do you build your own charging stations at Waymo depots?
We work with partners. One of the big aspects of our story is that we’re partnering with the ecosystem to really bring [autonomous vehicles] and EVs along. Finding partners is a big piece of that.
Building out the electric infrastructure is complicated for a variety of reasons. We need a lot of power. There are different sorts of zoning restrictions, things like that, different types of permits that we need. We’re working through that.
Having systems that are fully digital we can have very good predictions about when we’re going to need to charge the vehicles and what their shift life will be like throughout the course of the day. Similarly, with the charging infrastructure, we know when it’s going to be up and running and when it’s going to need maintenance. Things like that are really key to allowing us to make the most of the fleet.
Since charging EVs takes a lot of time compared with gasoline fueling, are you having vehicles out of service for a couple of hours at a time, which reduces utilization rates?
We use Level-3 charging, so it’s much faster. And then there are things the vehicle needs to do periodically. We want to make sure that the car is as clean as possible, right? That’s a great thing to do during the charging cycle. All that sort of maintenance we compress into the charging cycle and that allows us to maximize the utility.
What Else We’re Reading
Why the megarich insist on buying homes in extreme weather zones. They aren’t just purchasing property in areas prone to hurricanes, flooding and extreme drought—they’re also paying record prices to do so (Wall Street Journal)
Years of climate action demolished in days. Trump’s environmental directives are gutting basic protections for Americans and the agencies designed to deliver them (Bloomberg)
Why Al Gore is shifting his climate activism abroad. Given the Trump administration’s recent moves relating to climate, the former vice president is looking to the developing world for the next generation of climate activism (New York Times)
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency is poised to eliminate most websites tied to its research division under plans for the cancellation of a cloud web services contract, a move that could snarl operations at several labs (Bloomberg)
States lead on landfill methane emissions as federal action stalls. The EPA was set to tighten rules on landfill operators. With Trump in charge, state policies may be the nation’s best bet at curbing these emissions (Canary Media)