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LAS VEGAS — There were plenty of reasons to think that this year’s RE+, the U.S. solar industry’s biggest annual gathering, would be a gloomy and downtrodden affair.
The Trump administration had declared an energy emergency, then set about reducing energy supply by going after renewables projects. The massive spending law yanked nearly seven years of tax credits for wind and solar. The White House arbitrarily halted construction on two major offshore wind farms that had all their permits in order, raising the fear that it might block other fully approved projects. Tariffs have changed the price of parts that go into clean energy equipment on a sometimes weekly basis. The cleantech bankruptcies have been relentless: Powin, Sunnova, Mosaic, Northvolt, Li-Cycle, Nikola, to name a few.
“I can’t think of a time when we have been subject to quite as much of a brutal swing as we’ve been in now,” said Abby Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, which puts on the conference.
But when I got to the exhibit hall at the Venetian Expo, it stretched farther than I’d ever seen at a clean energy show, and I heard rumors of additional halls above and below. The exhibitors even sprawled across a sunwashed bridge to Caesar’s Forum, where vendors of flow batteries and other alternative technologies hawked their wares, quite fittingly, from the periphery of the event.
Final attendance for the show hit 37,000, just shy of the record 40,000 from the previous two years, and other metrics broke records. The mood on the floor, in the halls, and at the myriad Vegas afterparties reflected an industry that had taken some punches, had lost some nice things, but was nonetheless charging forward, resolute and battle-tested.
“If you’d asked me in May how I was feeling about RE+, I would have a very different answer,” Hopper noted at a roundtable with journalists a few days into the show. “But we have more exhibitors than we’ve ever had in our history, and we have more registration revenue than we’ve ever had in our history. … [People] are really, really hungry for information and for a vision for what’s coming next.”
Judging by this year’s dire headlines, the show’s ebullient atmosphere does not seem entirely rational. Of course, even teetering startups try to project confidence among peers, customers, and especially journalists. And the overstimulated Vegas backdrop inspires a particular strain of optimism, the kind that encourages you to light cash on fire and feel lucky for the opportunity.
But after three days of roaming the frenetic halls, I came to see this year’s positive outlook as warranted. The general consensus among conference goers seemed to be that though political headwinds are blowing hard, economic tailwinds are blowing harder. Here are three reasons why I think they are right.
With the federal tax credits cut short, fewer solar projects will get built, and costs will rise for the ones that still go forward, passing on higher energy bills to American consumers.
But, with a little distance from the sting of this summer’s legislative setbacks, many solar and energy storage professionals believe losses in the policy arena are counterbalanced by increasingly rosy outlooks in the marketplace.
“I think people tend to over-orient on the policy story, and under-orient on the economic and financial story,” said Alfred Johnson, CEO of the clean energy financing platform Crux, as we sipped espressos outside the hubbub of the cavernous expo halls.
Johnson’s company launched as a marketplace for tax credit transferability, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act, but has expanded into other forms of financing, like debt and tax equity. That perch gives him visibility into clean energy project economics and the flows of capital into the sector. He ticked off a series of key factors defining the current energy market: Electricity prices are way up; solar and battery keeps getting cheaper while improving performance; gas prices are rising as the Trump administration promotes exports; gas turbine prices are rising due to intense competition from buyers.
In short, it’s a bad time to be someone who uses electricity in America, despite President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to cut energy prices. That means, though, that it’s a great time to be someone who sells power.
Even better for power producers, the biggest new customers — data centers — have the price sensitivity of a ravenous grizzly bear. They’re trying, with the enthusiastic support of the White House, to win a global arms race to unlock artificial superintelligence, whatever that means. Facing such civilizational stakes, the hyperscalers aren’t going to quibble over nickels and dimes.
Even with elevated electricity prices, hyperscalers still have to pay a lot more for the “graphics processing units” that train and run their AI models, Johnson noted. And once they’ve paid for those GPUs, they want to use them as much as possible, which means gobbling up as much electricity as they can get.
“The value of being faster on delivering the model … is worth so much more … than the additional cost of energy, which means that the marginal demand in a lot of these markets is the data centers, who are not price sensitive,” Johnson said.
Solar is clearly the cheapest source of new electricity production. But what matters most now is speed to market, and here solar and batteries easily trounce all other commercially viable sources of power. Taking mass-produced panels and parts and assembling them in a field is fundamentally easier than constructing a traditional large power plant. And it’s a hell of a lot easier than some of the hyperscalers’ other ideas, like building nonexistent nuclear fusion plants, or nonexistent small modular reactors, or restarting a long-shuttered nuclear reactor at the notorious Three Mile Island plant.
These dynamics led some of my fellow conference goers to muse about a counterfactual choice: Would you rather have strong federal policy tailwinds and an unfavorable market, or booming market fundamentals but unfavorable policy? Nine months ago, the industry enjoyed both. Trump ended those good times, but the robust market serves to mollify the pain of his policy attacks.
SEIA has strived to welcome energy storage into the fold, and diversification from solar alone looks especially prescient these days. Rooftop solar is struggling in a big way, with the federal onslaught and friendly fire from states like California, and large-scale developers are racing to cram in a bumper crop of projects before tax credits disappear next July. (Projects that start construction after that must be operating by the end of 2027 to qualify for the federal incentives.) But storage companies evaded the policy setbacks of their solar-powered brethren, and are building toward yet another record year of construction.
“Right now, we are seeing all of the factors are very supportive to storage,” said Johnson. “Demand is going up, there’s more of a focus on having dispatchable power. It got tax credits for the first time in the IRA … and then it retained the tax credits in [the One Big Beautiful Bill Act].”
The budget law preserves the battery-installation tax credits through 2033, with the stipulation that projects prove they don’t excessively rely on parts or corporate support from China. That sparked initial concerns from some analysts that these Foreign Entity of Concern rules (FEOC) could be enforced in a way that strangles development arbitrarily.
A few months later, many storage developers are encouraged by how clearly the text of the law lays out the boxes to check. Even so, compliance creates extra work for the American companies trying to expand the capacity of the grid, and the law does not explicitly encourage domestic manufacturing, since the rules are anti-China rather than pro-America.
Trump’s tariffs also pose a unique threat to storage, because so many of the battery cells used in these projects come from China. The U.S. has only just begun building supply chains for lithium ferrous phosphate, the battery chemistry now favored for grid storage. LG opened an LFP factory in Michigan this summer; AESC did so in an old Nissan Leaf battery plant in Tennessee, and Tesla is working on one in Nevada slated to start up early next year.
Now, said Brian Hayes, CEO of storage developer Key Capture Energy, it’s common for suppliers to offer three battery-sourcing options: China, Southeast Asia, and domestic. Buyers can toggle based on current tariff rates, U.S. manufacturing premiums, and the FEOC obligations of a particular project. Once the new FEOC rules kick in, though, the industry will need to move away from Chinese-made battery cells.
“I’m feeling a lot more positive today than I was six months ago,” said Hayes, whose company has built 40 megawatts in New York and 580 megawatts in Texas. “We ended up in a good place.”
That’s not to say storage developers can afford to get complacent.
“We can’t rest on our laurels,” Hayes mused. “We always have to be paying attention to what else could come.”
The Biden administration combined trade policy with methodical domestic incentives to reshore the manufacturing of clean energy equipment and other tech, like semiconductors. Trump supports the resurgence of domestic manufacturing in theory, but his primary tactic for that goal has been frequently shifting and legally dubious tariffs. These policies raise the price for materials that American manufacturers need to make their products and for the equipment required to build new factories, and they undermine the long-term certainty that reassures investors.
Still, the reshoring of clean energy supply chains has continued, and signs touting FEOC compliance have become a new form of currency on the expo hall floors.
Nextracker, the homegrown solar-tracking manufacturer and publicly traded cleantech success story, used the occasion of the conference to publicize its acquisition of Origami Solar for $53 million. That marked a refreshing shift in an era when cleantech acquisitions have tended to feature bankruptcy auctions or the kind of firesale where participants abashedly refuse to share the purchase price.
Origami developed a steel frame technology to replace the usual aluminum frames that wrap around solar panels. This enhances structural integrity as solar modules grow ever larger and more powerful. Indiana manufacturer Bila Solar, for instance, recently tapped Origami to frame its new 550-watt solar module.
But beyond preventing bending or buckling, the acquisition is a domestic-production play. The U.S. aluminium industry has cratered since the 1980s, so aluminum frames are now largely an import business, subject to all the vagaries of trade in 2025. The U.S. still makes things with steel though; Nextracker has been working with partners to open steel plants around the country to produce the torque tubes that carry the panels through their daily rotation. Origami manufactures in the U.S. too; now Nextracker can offer a more complete domestic solar package, making it easier for developers to clinch the 10% tax credit adder for Made-in-America content.
Over in Texas, module manufacturer T1 Energy signed a deal a few weeks back with glass producer Corning for a lot more than oven-safe casserole dishes. Corning subsidiary Hemlock Semiconductor will make hyper-pure polysilicon and carve it into solar wafers in Michigan, to supply T1’s forthcoming solar cell factory starting in the second half of 2026.
I tracked down Alex Zhu, CEO of ES Foundry, which in January opened one of the only currently operating solar cell factories in the country. Production from the 1-gigawatt line in Greenwood, South Carolina, is already sold out until 2027, Zhu said. He has greenlit a 2-gigawatt expansion, slated to be fully running by June 2026, to meet demand from domestic panel producers. A digital display by the company’s booth advertised “No FEOC Ownership. No FEOC Board. No FEOC Funding.”
Zhu stressed that it wasn’t easy opening a cell factory when the U.S. lacks a supply chain for some of the industrial inputs that are abundant and cheap in China. One of the key gases used in the process cost him 120 times the rate it sells for in that country’s solar industry centers. But Zhu nonetheless raised investment, launched the company, and built the factory all in the last two years.
Sales of these U.S.-made cells very much depend on the domestic content adder to compete with cheaper imports: “That’s the only drive to make the economic sense to buy a more expensive domestic module and domestic cell,” Zhu noted.
That’s a clear risk factor, because that perk will disappear along with the solar tax credits. But tax rules say that if developers start construction before next July 4, they can take up to four years to finish projects. That means projects could get built with both the credit and the domestic content adder through the end of the decade.
It’s hard to know what context manufacturers will be operating in at that point. But Zhu noted that “after five years, we definitely need to move to the next generation.” Much like semiconductor fabs, solar cell factories must regularly refresh themselves to keep up with technological advancements.
Longer-term certainty would be nice for the generational effort to reshore the solar supply chain, but maybe five busy years of manufacturing is enough to look forward to right now.
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