By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent
What Happened: The Motley Fool, a stock analysis website, wrote an article with the headline – Solar-Manufacturing Renaissance Already Falling Apart, which then went on to
- Express surprise that the Trump 30% tariffs on solar modules hasn’t had module companies flocking to the United States in droves.
- Come to the shocking (not shocking) conclusion that maybe the tariffs won’t drive an American module renaissance, let alone a manufacturing renaissance.
SolarWakeup’s View: There’s a larger question here, sparked by the odd headline: Can something fall apart if it was almost entirely mythical to begin with?
When Trump imposed these nonsensical tariffs at the behest of two foreign-owned companies (I have my blood pressure meds at hand this time), there were some in the solar industry who, all evidence to the contrary, insisted this would do just what the Motley Fool is surprised isn’t happening: Bring back solar module manufacturing jobs.
Clearly, that has not happened.
Having had it up to here with an argument that was just increasingly ringing false, I did back-of-an-envelope calculations about five weeks ago comparing concrete job losses and announced job gains, and posted the results on Twitter. Here’s what I concluded;
-9,800 + 829 jobs = -8,971. That’s still a
huge net loss, and this isn’t the end of the job losses by any stretch (I shudder at what next year’s numbers will look like). Now if we don’t lose another job in the downstream industry and thousands of manufacturing jobs come, I’ll eat crow.
I’m not exactly getting prepping my grill or getting my seasonings ready.
It should also be noted that my figuring assumed JinkoSolar would actually fully staff its new headquarters in Jacksonville, which it has since announced will be barely half of the jobs in initially promised.
So what lesson have we learned here? We’ve learned that tariffs don’t work, so you shouldn’t do them for any companies, let alone two that don’t have the best interests of the United States at heart.
Someone should forward this to Trump before he severely damages the aluminum and steel industries, too (and thereby further damage solar, by the way).
Oh, and tell The Motley Fool guys to stop fooling around.
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