Outside the husk of a shuttered yarn factory, thousands of old solar panels lie stacked on the gravel. Local leaders say they can see the future here: 1,200 people recycling millions of those panels each year and making the glass to build new ones.
This is no field of dreams. A company, Solarcycle, has already spent about $50 million of $500 million it plans to invest to turn the empty space into a recycling operation and build an adjacent glass manufacturing plant. Land has been purchased, permits have been secured, and hiring for jobs starting at $40,000 annually could be just months away.
It’s the kind of project that scientists say could ultimately reduce carbon emissions and that economists call a major step in bringing manufacturing back to the United States from China. And it spells opportunity in Cedartown, Ga., a city of about 10,000, where Pirkle’s Deli on Main Street does a brisk lunch business but other establishments see little foot traffic. Once operational, Solarcycle would be the area’s largest employer.
And yet President Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill has stopped the Solarcycle factory in its tracks. The legislation, which passed the House and is now being debated in the Senate, would essentially eliminate the tax breaks that companies have been counting on to build new wind and solar projects, electric vehicle battery factories and more.
Republicans in the House voted to get rid of the clean energy subsidies in order to pay for Mr. Trump’s income tax breaks, even if it meant hurting investment in their districts. The Cedartown plant is on hold until the Senate decides the fate of the credits.
It was not supposed to be this way. Democrats built the clean energy tax credits into the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which they passed without any Republican votes. Since then, nearly 80 percent of the $843 billion in new electric vehicle factories, battery plants and solar and wind projects has flowed to Republican-led districts, something Democrats believed would insulate the tax credits from politics.
But in Cedartown, many people interviewed said they’d never heard of the Inflation Reduction Act and did not connect it to the Solarcycle factory. Some of those who had heard about the law described it as wasteful spending.
“They spent billions of dollars on the wind, and it didn’t work,” said Miller Green, 93, who had stopped in at the Polk County Historical Society Museum with his wife. She admonished him to stop talking about politics.
It seems unlikely that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican whose northwest Georgia district includes Cedartown, will face any political blowback from voting to eliminate the clean energy tax breaks that Solarcycle was banking on.
“We’re still at the point where the economic benefits are still pretty vague,” said Scott Lincicome, a trade economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization. “It’s not like the factory has been a staple of the town for a generation.”
Tyler Short, a local real estate agent in Cedartown, agreed. “Until we see somebody get hired, until somebody goes to Kroger’s and tells their friend in the produce section, ‘Hey, I just got a job there,’ it’s not real yet,” he said.
“We’re not rich by any means, but nobody here is really hurting,” Mr. Short said. If the factory is not built, people will continue to work at Hon, an office furniture manufacturing company that has a factory in Cedartown, or commute to jobs closer to Atlanta or Birmingham, he said.
Still, repealing the clean energy tax credits would threaten billions of dollars’ worth of economic investment. In Georgia alone, there have been more than $23.9 billion in new clean energy investments and more than 32,000 new jobs created since the law took effect.
“People in these rural communities like Cedartown, where you have companies like Solarcycle, will be hard hit if those companies decide to make a different decision because these investments are being pulled back,” warned Senator Raphael Warnock, Democrat of Georgia.
“I don’t understand why we would disinvest in places like Cedartown just to give billionaires a tax cut they don’t need,” he said.
It turns out that Republicans feared defying Mr. Trump more than they feared endangering jobs, analysts said.
“Voting no would have been a career-ender,” said Brian Robinson, a Republican political consultant in Georgia.
Among the Republicans who voted for Mr. Trump’s tax bill was Representative Buddy Carter. His southeast Georgia district is home to a $5.5 billion Hyundai electric vehicle, hybrid and battery manufacturing plant.
Mr. Carter had previously signed a letter with 17 other House Republicans calling to protect clean energy credits.
But Mr. Carter, who is running for a Senate seat, said he ultimately voted for Mr. Trump’s package because he wanted to “unleash energy dominance” and to cut taxes for his constituents.
Charlie Bailey, the chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, maintains that there will be consequences in the upcoming elections for Republicans “including the entire congressional delegation of fools who voted in lock step to take these jobs away.”
But so far there hasn’t been much fallout.
One union-backed organization posted an online advertisement accusing Mr. Carter of voting to “kill thousands of jobs.” As of Friday it had gotten 45 views.
Ms. Greene argued in an interview that her district needed more workers, not more manufacturing. Polk County has a 3.1 percent unemployment rate, lower than the national average, and Ms. Greene said she believed that companies using green tax incentives were “importing foreign labor” because there weren’t enough local employees. “It’s fake job creation,” she said.
Ms. Greene said she would like to see Solarcycle succeed — but not if it requires federal incentives. She said she didn’t feel similarly about subsidies for fossil fuels, which have been in place for a century, because she felt oil and gas are central to the economy.
“I am not interested in giving handouts to companies that are not essential to our society and our survival,” she said. “I wish Solarcycle and every single company, I wish them the greatest success, but if they are unable to open a factory because they didn’t get a tax credit, then that means they weren’t able to stand on their feet to begin with.”
If local officials in Ms. Greene’s district object to her position, they’re not saying it.
Jamie Morris, who chairs the city and county’s development authority, said many in Cedartown were excited about the Solarcycle plant. “All I hear is ‘When are we getting these jobs?’ and ‘When can I send my son to get a job up there at that plant?’” he said. “It’s been years since anything of this magnitude has come to Polk County.”
And yet all he would say regarding Ms. Greene’s vote to kill the tax credits — and possibly the Solarcycle plant — was that “it was a tough vote.”
Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a Republican, has said that new industries were already moving into Georgia before the Inflation Reduction Act and that he objected to its tax credits because they were “forcing the market on people.” Georgia offers state and local tax incentives and abatements, and Mr. Kemp’s office has credited those with luring Hyundai and other companies.
At the Polk County Historical Society Museum, Arleigh Johnson, the director, has traced Cedartown’s industrial history from limestone mining in the 1800s to textiles in the early 1900s to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, which closed down in 1983. The Gildan yarn facility, now the site of Solarcycle, closed in 2022, laying off 107 employees.
Ms. Johnson said that while some residents wanted to keep Cedartown a small community and objected to a business that might bring newcomers, most wanted to see Solarcycle open.
“I don’t see where it would do anything but good to have more jobs here, because, as it is, people go out of this county to work, and then their money goes out of this county,” she said.
That’s something Tyler Grimes said he had found, too. Mr. Grimes, who is Solarcycle’s facility manager, grew up in Alabama. His parents were raised in Polk County, and his grandfather was a pastor at two churches in the area.
“Everybody that’s from Cedartown, or from the community I’m from, they go off to college and get an engineering degree, and then they stay around Atlanta and Birmingham,” Mr. Grimes said. “This is an opportunity for a technology company to come to Cedartown and keep some of that brainpower that’s from here.”
Edward Guzman, Cedartown’s city manager, said the promise of the Solarcycle factory had lured other investments. New townhouses are being built, and Mr. Guzman said the city was in discussions with a “large-scale commercial development” that was not yet public.
At the Solarcycle offices, Rob Vinje, the chief operating officer, recently received word that the company’s plant in Odessa, Texas, can now handle the recycling of one million aging and battered solar panels each year.
The Cedartown factory, he said, will be able to process 10 million annually, or about 28,000 panels a day. And then in a circular process, it will use the materials to make new solar glass, diverting the supply chain from China, which currently provides about 80 percent of the glass used in solar panels.
“Rather than buy it from China, let’s go employ people from Cedartown, Ga., and go make glass domestically,” Mr. Vinje said. He estimated that the company could start hiring in July, but for the uncertainty around the Republican tax bill.
“If you told me tomorrow that President Trump said ‘Everything’s OK,’ we are shovel ready,” Mr. Vinje said. “We are ready to roll.”
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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