NY Times: “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….
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.”