Solar is “putting steel in the spine of the middle class,” Ali Zaidi, assistant to the president and national climate advisor, told the standing room only audience in the General Session at RE+ 2024.” He noted the workforce advances that outpace the rest of the economy and said that the industry is behind the biggest electrification since FDR. “You are creating an energy future that the history books will write about,” Zaidi said.
That clean energy future is brought into focus with recent numbers showing that in two years since passage of the IRA, the solar industry added 75 GW of new capacity, which is 36% of all solar capacity built in U.S. history, according to the U.S. Solar Market Insight Q3 2024 report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie. Additionally, the report finds that nearly 1.5 million American homes have installed solar passage of the IRA and 9.4 GW of new electric generation capacity was installed in Q2 2024.
The momentum is building and this is the time to tell the story, said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA.
Solar is not a blue or red issue but a bipartisan issue, she said, pointing to new polling by Global Strategy Group, North Star, and the SEIA that found that nearly 9 out of 10 voters support federal clean energy tax credits in the IRA. She noted that 78% of 2020 Trump voters support federal clean energy incentives with 10% of 2020 Trump voters strongly opposing these policies.
With the good news in abundance; however, Hopper said “we cannot keep doing business as usual.” SEIA, she said, now has a presence on the global stage to try to open up new markets for the U.S. solar industry. She said that as an industry association that is celebrating its 50th anniversary, it’s time that it set industry standards. SEIA is currently at work on 12 standards that will improve safety, supply chains and make a more equitable workforce.
The stakes couldn’t be higher, though, with an election taking place in less than two months. SEIA attended both the Republican and Democratic conventions, further emphasizing that “policy matters and clean energy is a bipartisan issue,” Hopper said.
Other initiatives that SEIA recently launched include the podcast “Good Energy,” and a new mobile app for members, with Hopper emphasizing the need to “stay connect, tell our story.”
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