In Georgia, a fight over credit for its clean energy boom todayheadline

If Joe Biden’s presidency had a capstone achievement, it was the Inflation Reduction Act, and if the IRA’s project of reindustrializing America through climate action has a poster child, it is Georgia. The Peach State is home to more new jobs expected to result from American clean energy projects announced since the law’s passage in August 2022 than any other state.

Those jobs — some 42,000, according to a report, shared with Grist first and publishing later today by Georgia senator Raphael Warnock — are now at risk, as congressional Republicans consider repealing some or all of the IRA’s tax credits to pay for President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts. The report argues that the possibility that IRA incentives may be discontinued has already had an impact. In February, two battery manufacturers, Freyr Battery and Aspen Aerogels, cancelled plans for new factories in Georgia. Those projects would have together brought 1,400 jobs to the state and invested nearly $3 billion.

The Republicans weighing whether to kill the IRA must contend with the politically inconvenient fact that it disproportionately benefits their constituents. “While this legislation was passed through reconciliation — a Democrat-only bill, ironically — three out of four of all the projects funded by the IRA have gone to House districts held by Republicans,” Warnock told Grist. “This is especially true in Georgia: 80 percent of the projects, 94 percent of the total investment, and 75 percent of the jobs are in Republican districts. I think that’s the reason why you are seeing a significant number of House Republicans — and I suspect that you will see more — standing up and saying, ‘We like these jobs.’” 

Just as the IRA was born out of one president’s dream legislative package — the Build Back Better plan — its destruction may come from his successor’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.” This is Trump’s nickname for a wish list of trillions of dollars in tax cuts and other policies that he hopes to pass through budget reconciliation, a procedure by which Congress can bypass the Senate filibuster and pass laws by majority vote. The reconciliation bill must follow the self-imposed blueprint crafted by Congressional Republicans in April according to which they must find at least $1.5 trillion in savings to offset the new spending.

The disagreement within Republican ranks has played out in a raft of letters from Congresspeople advocating for the preservation of various IRA tax credits. One House Republican, Mark Amodei of Nevada (home to the only operating American lithium mine) recently went so far as to suggest he wouldn’t vote for a reconciliation bill that repeals either of two key IRA tax credits: the 45x advanced manufacturing credit, which incentivizes production of solar and wind energy components, batteries, and critical minerals, and the 30d tax credit, which grants a credit of $7,500 to individuals who buy electric vehicles built in the U.S.

The situation presents elected Democrats with the strategic question of how, in the absence of voting power, to persuade their Republican colleagues to hold on to dollars that flow to their own districts. Warnock’s solution is simply to make the case for the IRA in public. By considering a repeal of the bill, “what they’re proposing is a job killer, pure and simple,” Warnock told Grist. “And the economics of killing jobs in Georgia in order to give tax cuts to billionaires in the name of creating jobs is silly on its face.”

Persuading voters to care about the clean energy manufacturing boom has been an uphill battle, partly because, in Georgia, like many other states, many of the IRA’s promised jobs have yet to materialize. Polling from a year ago found that four in 10 registered voters nationwide hadn’t even heard of the IRA. According to data shared with Grist by the advocacy group Climate Power, which took an account of public jobs and hiring data from companies, the post-IRA clean energy jobs in the state include 21,391 jobs for projects currently under construction, 4,510 job openings for projects that have begun hiring, 3,630 jobs for completed projects currently operational, and another 12,207 jobs at facilities that have only been announced for future construction.

Warnock’s report claims that “overall post-IRA business investment in Georgia clean energy manufacturing has totaled nearly $16.4 billion, which is over 10 times greater than clean energy manufacturing investment in the previous two years.”

However, two of Georgia’s electric vehicle manufacturing plants were announced in the year before the passage of the IRA. The December 2021 announcement of a $5 billion Rivian electric car plant and the May 2022 announcement of a $5.5 billion Hyundai EV and battery plant were each billed as the largest economic development project in state history. That the two giant EV plants — which would together bring 15,600 new jobs to Georgia, according to the estimates included in their initial announcements — immediately predate the IRA remains an inconvenient political fact for Democrats, and one that Warnock’s report seems to ignore.

Asked to clarify the figures, a Warnock spokesperson said that Rivian was “not included” in the $16.4 billion figure, but did not clarify further, and that whether the Hyundai investment was counted as pre- or post-IRA was “unclear” from the Clean Investment Monitor data the report relied on.

But the Warnock report serves a polemic function as well as an analytic one: Georgia Democrats are competing for recognition for the state’s job growth with the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who claims credit for using tax breaks to lure the Hyundai and Rivian plants to the state and has argued that the IRA hurt Georgia more than it helped. 

If the IRA is repealed in whole or part, the effects won’t just be felt by manufacturers or their future employees, although the industrial subsidies are the part of the bill that get the most attention, but also, perhaps more immediately, by the communities, homeowners and small organizations that are already receiving money through the law.

“It can look like all the IRA did was bring in flashy billion-dollar factories, and that’s a big part of it,” said Julian Harden, policy manager of Georgia Conservation Voters. But, Harden continued, “The IRA also helps people that are usually left out of the clean energy transition.”

From subsidies for low-income citizens to install rooftop solar to investments in a USDA program that pays farmers to invest in energy efficiency to the home energy rebates that help defray the costs of installing heat pumps and electrified cooking appliances, there are many programs through which the IRA is already directly affecting ordinary people’s lives — and, while these aren’t the focus of Warnock’s report, they may also play a role in building and maintaining support for the jeopardized law.