When Chris Taylor and his team at GridStor were building Santa Barbara county’s largest battery storage project in Goleta, CA they saw an opportunity: become one of the first companies to transfer tax credits under the newly passed Inflation Reduction Act. But there was no playbook to follow.
Instead of working with smaller, specialized investors, GridStor took an unconventional approach. They went straight to JP Morgan, one of the largest tax credit investors in the country, to prove that battery storage projects could work with mainstream financial institutions. The strategy involved navigating complex legal requirements, securing specific opinion letters, and creating a framework that other companies could follow.
In this episode, Lara Pierpoint talks to Chris Taylor, CEO of GridStor, about executing this groundbreaking financial deal while simultaneously building a 60-megawatt battery storage facility. They discuss the challenges of pioneering new financial territory, working with major financial institutions as a startup, and what successful tax credit transfers could mean for scaling clean energy projects.
Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts. For more reporting on the companies featured in this podcast, subscribe to Latitude Media’s newsletter.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media Podcast at the Frontier of Climate Technology.
Chris Taylor: We decided to have commemorative Gridstor electric logger brewed for us. What? That’s so cool. We handed out these made right there next door local beer as our gift for people who came to the event and people thought that was really cool. It was local and it’s not just a dumb hat or something. So people were pretty excited about that.
Lara Pierpoint: I think we’ve officially set the bar for swag, having brewed beer from the local brewery. That’s pretty cool. Last December, Chris Taylor was drinking a grid store electric lager surrounded by 44 Tesla mega pack two XL battery systems. He and his team were in the small coastal town of Goleta, California where they were celebrating the opening of the county’s largest battery storage project.
Chris Taylor: It was great because in our business you do all of this grinding away like to get bank loans done and to get permits and to get interconnects, and it’s all very not sexy and not very glamorous. And then you get one day after five years of grinding away where everybody loves you and you get to feel good about what you did and you can take pictures and explain what you did to your kids and feel proud of what you do.
Lara Pierpoint: The Goleta energy storage facility is 60 megawatts, which is enough electricity to serve about 30,000 households. And while that might not seem like a lot of homes in rural California, it’s a good chunk of the population and this area was the perfect spot for a grid scale battery.
Chris Taylor: It’s a point on the grid in California that suffers from a lack of reliable transmission capacity. It’s served by just one radial line and prone to blackouts due to things like earthquakes, firees, mudslides, et cetera. And this project provides critical clean capacity in an area of the grid that really needs it. And this area was also previously served by an old gas peaker plant as its only local source of energy. And now with the battery in place, hopefully they can transition to cleaner sources for that.
Lara Pierpoint: But grid-scale battery storage installations have been popping up all across the country for a while now. Just over six gigawatts of utility scale battery storage was added to the grid in 2023 according to the International Energy Agency. And this is a show about first of a kind projects. So what makes this one unique?
Chris Taylor: We were one of the first, if not the first project, to be able to effectuate a transfer of the new tax credits that are available under the Inflation Reduction Act, which is kind of an in the weeds wonky finance thing, but critically important to taking these kind of technologies to scale. And for us, that was a big achievement as a new company with our first project to also be able to monetize a new form of tax credit using new mechanisms with a big global institution was a huge accomplishment.
Lara Pierpoint: I’m Lara Pierpoint and this is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We’ve already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don’t have decades to get them commercialized. We have years this week I talked to Chris Taylor, CEO of Gridstor on how to take already proven technology to the next level of scale.
Chris Taylor: We need people out there developing the next generation of technology, which I’m frankly not smart enough to do. But you also need people like us out there every day doing the blocking and tackling to get these things built because just because the technology exists doesn’t mean that it’s being deployed at scale.
Lara Pierpoint: Gridstor is kind of an anomaly in the battery storage space because they’re not a traditional venture backed startup. In 2021, Goldman Sachs decided they really wanted to be in the battery storage business, but they couldn’t find the right investment opportunity, especially because they were looking for developers who are already building projects. So they decided to start their own battery development platform, which would become Gridstor.
Chris Taylor: Private equity funds typically don’t build companies, they typically buy companies and then grow them. In this case, this was really a true startup where I was hired to build a team and went forth and did so, and it’s really a blessing to be able to get started on a journey like this knowing that you have enough capital to get through the first project and the second project, most companies are raising a hundred million or 200 million, which is just about enough to build one thing and then you’re out of money again.
Lara Pierpoint: When Goldman called Chris to lead the new company, the bank had already acquired the rights to the Goleta project and they wanted someone who had experience building things and growing markets to both complete the Goleta project and to build out the new company.
Chris Taylor: To me, it’s the chance to build something new in a new space. That’s what I thrive on. My entire career has been trying to build something new, whether it’s a new initiative in a big company like I did at Google or being part of the first wave of wind development in the United States. That’s what’s interesting to me. So it’s a new industry and as you mentioned, it’s not just the tech that’s first of a kind, but what’s the commercial structure? What’s the financing structure? There’s so many other ways you can innovate.
Lara Pierpoint: So Chris jumped at the opportunity, but now he had to figure out how to build a grid scale storage project. When Chris came on board, the Goleta project was already in a pretty good place. Gridstore had the land to build the project and the land use permits. They had a contract with the utility SoCal Edison to sell the electricity for resource adequacy and they had a contract with Tesla to supply the batteries. Plus they had an approved interconnection request, which is incredibly valuable.
Chris Taylor: We really just had to go out and make friends with all of our neighbors because we were the new owner and we needed them to know us and trust us and know who to call. And we really just went out of our way to get to know the neighbors, spend time answering their questions, how these things work, and really spending that time explaining ourselves, getting to know people and answering questions. It’s a very retail process and there’s no substitute for it
Lara Pierpoint: With all the permits secured and buy-in from the community. Chris and the grid store team turned their attention to the construction and financing at the top. Chris mentioned monetizing IRA tax credits, but when Goldman brought Chris on to build the Goleta energy storage facility, the IRA hadn’t even passed. Remember this was 2021, but Goldman was betting big that it would and in 2022, that bet paid off. But even with the passage of the IRA, the GTA project still needed capital to get construction and financing to finish the project, and Gridstore had to figure out how to put together one of these tax credit transfers. No one had done it yet. So I talked with Chris about how all of these pieces came together. So talk about your plan for financing the project. Again, you’re a little bit different from some other folks we speak to in that you didn’t need or have VC funding. You essentially had a private equity funding model. So how did you think about funding the GTA project? Did you and what sorts of sources of funding did you consider?
Chris Taylor: I mean, that’s one other thing back to the choice of Tesla I should have mentioned is that Tesla was clearly a manufacturer that is well capitalized, well known and trusted by lenders and investors. So that certainly made it easier If we were using an unproven technology or a company that didn’t have much of a balance sheet or a track record, I think that would’ve made this much more difficult, if not impossible. And also for us as an early stage company at the time, one thing that’s important to mention is a company like Tesla, they deliver what’s called an integrated solution. It has sort of everything that you need to go just you need a transformer and a substation and then they take care of the rest. Other vendors, you have to do the so-called integration. So you buy the basic building block a DC block from them, and then you need to add the inverter, power, electronics and other pieces yourself.
We’re now doing that ourselves on subsequent projects, but when we were still a small team, that probably would’ve been too much to take on. But given that we had this advanced technology that was well accepted by the market and we had a long-term contract with a credit worthy utility in the form of SoCal ed, it seemed to us like this could be a project that we could successfully finance. Even as a new company, we did have the benefit of that private equity backing, which allowed us to not have to wait to get construction debt to be able to start construction. So this project probably wouldn’t have gotten built on that schedule if we’d had to wait for all that. So we were able to go out and use our balance sheet to start building the project and then figure out the financing as we went along.
So in the end, we did get project debt on the project from a consortium of two different banks, and then we also were able to monetize the tax credit via this new mechanism, which is called a transfer. In the past, in order to capture the value of a tax credit provided by the federal government, you had to bring in or you have to bring in an investor that’s not yourself, some other third party investor, typically a bank or an insurance company to be a partner in the project. Then they get assigned those tax benefits. That’s a much bigger and more complicated thing for the third party investor to do than to just buy the tax credit, which is effectively what we did in this case.
Lara Pierpoint: So you’ve got these really interesting sources of capital here. So you’ve got essentially your private equity as kind of a way to get the project construction started. You’ve got debt that comes in later, and then finally tax credit transfers that come in at the very end. So as you’re getting the project started and you’ve got your private equity financiers backing the initial construction, were they ready to fund you all the way through construction if needed, or were you a little bit sort of under the gun to get some external financing in order to finish the construction?
Chris Taylor: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, the truth is we knew we had enough capital to do the entire project on the balance sheet if we needed to. And given that we were a new company and we were trying to get moving quickly, there was an understanding that this was going to be our first project and we didn’t have the whole team in place to do everything in the normal sequence of things. So I think there was an acceptance going in, this was going to be a little bit of a one-off. We were certainly trying to line up financing as early in the process as we could because the cost of debt is cheaper than the cost of private equity. So it’s certainly in our financial interest to do so. But the goal was really also to get it right and to have a good outcome with our investors so that the lenders and tax equity investors would want to do repeat business with us. So there was a willingness to sacrifice some efficiency in order to move quickly and also get to the right outcome.
Lara Pierpoint: So did you try to seek debt before you even started project construction?
Chris Taylor: No, I don’t think we could have. Typically, there’s two kinds of debt you would get. One is construction debt to build the project, then you need some kind of takeout financing. How are they going to get paid back at the end? If you have a contract to sell the tax equity to somebody, you can get what’s called a tax equity bridge loan. To do that, you need to have locked in revenue. So if you have contracted revenue, you can typically get those kind of debt instruments on the front end. If you’re doing merchant, you typically cannot do that or only at a much lower level.
Lara Pierpoint: And so the fact that this was a combination of those two types of revenue meant that it was going to be challenging.
Chris Taylor: Yeah, I think that one other thing to understand is that typically when you do get construction debt, you as the sponsor still have to put in a certain amount of equity before they’re going to put in any equity anyway. So even if you had had a construction debt agreement in place once you started construction, they wouldn’t provide the first dollar of capital. You’ve got to provide the first dollar, and then when you get to a certain amount, then they step in after. So we figured we would spend our requisite portion and hopefully bring in a lender sometime around that time.
Lara Pierpoint: But I guess it sounds then it was important to the debt lenders in this case, given how this was sort of approaching first of a kind for them, that they saw that you had initialized construction and that that was going well. So is that right, and were there kind of specific milestones? What were the things that were decisive that when you showed them to the debt investors, they said, that’s the thing that makes me believe in you and I’m ready to go?
Chris Taylor: I think it was more than one thing. I think it’s a combination of a credit worthy brand name customer with a long-term contract. So there’s some guaranteed revenue from our contract with Southern California Edison and they’ve been around a long time and they have a strong credit rating. That’s a huge plus. Second, I think, is the fact that even though Gridstore was an unknown entity, Goldman Sachs most certainly is not. And that certainly gave the banks and lenders some sense that, okay, this isn’t two guys in a truck. This is a real entity with real backing and Goldman Sachs as a track record of being successful at these kinds of things. I think that certainly helped and benefited us. And then the third was using technology that nobody had any real questions about. Who is that? Why are you using them? Do they have a credit rating?
Again, people have all heard of Tesla. Probably a lot of the bankers drive one themselves. So I think that certainly helped. I think long-term revenue from a credit worthy offtaker, a bank, a bankable sponsor with a track record, and it’s not just the name Goldman Sachs, but the people on our team had real track record building and operating projects and could answer questions. Those are probably the key factors that made this attractive to banks and also banks. While they’re risk averse and they’re cautious, they’re also competitive capitalists. And so there is FOMO amongst bankers when they see that a new sector like batteries is poised for double digit annual growth, they don’t want to see all that business go to their rivals. They want to make sure they get on the ground floor too. So there’s kind of a chicken and egg thing where they don’t want to necessarily be the first because that’s scary, but they definitely don’t want to be the 50th. They want to get in early and build that business and be a first mover. And that’s kind of the tension that we have to work with.
Lara Pierpoint: Well, I love that we’re using the word fomo, not just because I always want to be hip with the kids, but also I think it’s real, right? This is how you want to work with investors is to try to get them to a point that they’re excited to participate and really jumping in. So that’s very cool. We’re going to talk a little bit more specifically about the tax credit sale in a little bit here, but was that also something that was on the horizon when you’re bringing in these debt investors? Was that part of the reason that they were willing to commit to this project that they knew you were going to work on doing that, or was that kind of not part of what they factored in when they ultimately decided to fund you?
Chris Taylor: So when the project was acquired, it wasn’t clear that we would be eligible for any form of tax credit. So that all happened from the time the project was acquired to when we got it built. So I think we knew that the tax credits would be, the project would be eligible for them, but I don’t know that that was, I couldn’t really tell you if that was a decisive factor for the banks or not.
Lara Pierpoint: Interesting. Alright, let’s get into the actual of the project. I love this part because we get to talk about real steel in the ground. So when did you break ground and what was your construction timeline?
Chris Taylor: Yeah, we broke ground in Q1 of 2023. I can’t remember what month it was. I think it was probably in March, if I remember correctly. It was not the beginning of the quarter. That was when we had full mobilization to site. We started moving dirt and clearing and grubbing in the fall of 2022, but we didn’t actually have full construction crews on site and do full mobilization until Q1 of 23. And we energized and started operating in December of 23. So effectively the project was built in under a year, and like I said, most of the action happens very quickly once the site’s been cleared and it’s ready to go. Unfortunately for us. Then we had the biblical deluge of 2023 on the California coast. If you remember, it rained more than in any year in recent memory. And the places where our batteries were supposed to go looked like swimming pools.
So we had to de-water the site, which means come in and suck the water out so that it can dry faster. But luckily we were able to make up on schedule. We had to work some nights and weekends to get that done, but we were able to do that. I think we were installing a mega pack every two and a half minutes at the peak of construction. It’s pretty incredible. That’s how fast they were able to load them on. Maybe it was every five minutes, but they’re able to pick them off this truck with a crane, set them where they go on these concrete piers, and then from that same position, pivot, pick up one more, put it where it goes, move the crane, bring in two more trucks, all within this highly confined space. It was quite a thing of sort of industrial ballet to watch
Lara Pierpoint: And just like that, within nine months of starting construction, Gridstore had its first operational grid scale battery storage project, but now the team had to put together one of the first ever tax credit transfers using IRA tax credits. We’ll get to that after the break. So now you have a project that’s up and running, it’s working, you’re serving SoCal Edison’s needs, and at this point you went further into exploring a tax credit sale. So can you start by just explaining what that was and when you started considering doing this?
Chris Taylor: Well, we knew we were going, as soon as the Inflation reduction Act passed, we knew that this project would be qualified to receive those tax credits. And actually because that law hadn’t passed when the project was first acquired, that was really on me and my team to figure out how to monetize that credit. Obviously we had people on my team that have done tax credits. I did a lot of tax credit investing at Google and before, and obviously the Goldman Sachs team knows a thing or two about this, but it was new and none of us had ever done it before with batteries. We deliberately went to one of the biggest financial institutions in the world that does these kinds of things. That would be more difficult to close a deal with them. But that if we did, that would be a real proof point for us.
And also they could be a potential partner for future projects because they have a lot of scale. So we went straight to the biggest of the big boys, and I think again, the Goldman Sachs backing, the SoCal a contract and the Tesla equipment probably helped get them interested in doing that deal. But we were able to structure that, which is a transfer, like I mentioned, where there is no actual partnership. You’re just selling them the tax credits at some discount to if it’s worth a dollar, they buy it for 90 something cents, and then the difference between what they pay and the face value is sort of their profit, if you will. So we were able to do that, and very few of these had ever been done because again, in wind and solar, there wasn’t any process like this. There was no selling of tax credit.
So it’s new, there’s got a ton of lawyers involved and accountants on every side and a lot of sort of reassuring of people. But it’s a pretty straightforward process. And at the end we got that done with JP Morgan, which is fantastic because they’re probably the biggest player in our space in terms of tax credit monetization. And if we’re going to build gigawatts of batteries every year, that means we need billions of dollars of tax credits to be flowing into the space in order for that to work. The IRA doesn’t work without private parties that are willing to buy these credits. The government doesn’t actually write us a check.
Lara Pierpoint: Right. Well, so let’s get into that a little bit. I really want to get into the why around tax credits. And I think for those of us in the climate ecosystem, when we think of tax credits, we think of incentives to basically get a project built. And so the theory is you’ve got a project, you want to build it somewhere. It’s not quite bankable, but if you can get tax credits, that’s almost a way of, I don’t know, thinking about almost an alternative source of revenue. And so whether there is an entity involved that can take on that tax credit or you can sell that tax credit to someone who can, that’s a way to get a project finance that otherwise wouldn’t. I think that’s how we normally think about it. But this is a case where it’s a little bit different where you essentially were already building the project. As you mentioned, the project was kind of entrained before the IRA even passed. So for you, what was sort of the impetus for even thinking about a tax credit sale? Was there something that improved about the project economics afterwards or how did you think about that?
Chris Taylor: I mean, the way I think about, it’s similar to what you said. It’s also it can make the project itself or the product that the project is offering more competitive and therefore more attractive to the end buyer. So the price that the buyer of the output of a wind farm or battery or solar project has to pay net of the tax credit is 40%, 30% lower than they would’ve otherwise had to pay. And so that creates more demand on the same. I think it’s important to understand both that if wind costs 30% more tomorrow, there’d be fewer wind contracts signed. If storage costs 30% more tomorrow, fewer people would sign storage contracts. So that’s an important part of it is inciting demand. And the second part, as you said, is creating more financing available for those projects. But effectively you can think of it as the government is saying, you can sell these tax credits that you didn’t have yesterday. The government’s sort of giving you those tax credits by fiat and you are selling them, and you get to keep most of the proceeds and use that to buy down the cost of the project. So I think of it as sort of an upfront capital subsidy from the government to make these projects less expensive.
Lara Pierpoint: Okay. So walk me through the process. So you’ve got a project that’s up and running. You’ve got a contract signed with SoCal Edison for resource adequacy. The IRA has passed and you’re now thinking about how to apply a tax credit sale to this particular project. So what’s the first step?
Chris Taylor: Yeah, the first step is I guess determining what you think the most likely candidates are for counterparties on the other side to monetize the credit for you. So there’s a pretty well understood league table of who are the biggest investors. Historically it’s been wind and solar and they have different appetites of both how much they want to do and what type of deals they do. So me and my team mostly we came from the renewable energy space, so it’s all the same people we’ve been dealing with for the last 20 some odd years. So you kind of know the biggest investors in the US have historically been JP Morgan, B of A, US Bank, Wells Fargo, people like that. So you start with those people. If they’re not a fit for some reason because they have a sort of specific box of what they will do, then you have to start thinking about smaller players who maybe have a specific niche that aligns with what you’re trying to do. In this case, like I said, we wanted to go to the big mainstream players and demonstrate that this was a mainstream product that even the biggest banks can get behind. And so that’s why we did it this way, which is kind of unusual for a first of a kind thing. You’d typically think you’d go to some smaller niche player that’s interested in doing something new and unusual, but that’s not how we approach this one.
Lara Pierpoint: So you approach the investor, the IRA has passed, and so what happens next? Do you need to get some sort of guidance directly from Treasury that says that you’re eligible for these tax credits or is that something that the investor can determine for you?
Chris Taylor: Yeah, unfortunately Treasury doesn’t do that. You have to get very expensive opinion letters from very expensive lawyers at very specific firms. And there’s a should opinion, there’s a May. Look, there’s these very specific cryptic words. A should level opinion means they say the IRS should approve this. That’s kind of the gold standard of what you’re looking for. So you as the lender, as the borrower, you pay for the banks or the investors’ lawyers to grill you and diligence your project and issue them with opinions. That’s how they get comfortable with it, is they do need to decide in advance before they make the investment that it’s going to work because they don’t get pre-approval from the IRS. So typically you approach a larger group of investors, have initial conversations, determine who’s most interested and who seems like a fit, narrow that down to a smaller group to whom you sign NDAs. You give them real information about the project, they give you feedback about what they’d be willing to do. Then you typically shrink that group to just one or two players get to a final agreed terms or a term sheet, and then you go exclusive with them, and then you hopefully enter into definitive agreements within a couple of months.
Lara Pierpoint: Got it. And then so ultimately, does the transaction just look like a straight sale? So all the proceeds go directly to you, Gridstor as a company and all of the tax credit benefits are now owned by JP Morgan? Is that how that works?
Chris Taylor: Correct. And then they may, if they wish, they can then further farm that out or sell that down to their clients. I don’t know what they ultimately did with those credits, but some of the banks use them to reduce their own tax liability and some do that and sell those credits on to their bank clients.
Lara Pierpoint: I still love the idea by the way, of just a whole bunch of lawyers, basically spending a ton of time to basically decide on one word and is it should or is it may, and all the things that flow from that. The legal profession is awesome. I mean with all the seriousness in my heart. That’s very cool. Okay, so what happens next? So now you’ve completed this tax credit sale, presumably you have a whole lot of other projects in the pipeline. Where are you building? What are you doing? Where does Gridstore go from here?
Chris Taylor: This was like I said, really for us, a proof of concept, a chance to demonstrate and to both learn and demonstrate that we can do all of the things associated with financing a project, building a project. Now we’re operating the project every day. That’s a whole other expertise. Figuring out how to maximize the revenue available from a project is complicated. Predicting what’s going to happen with power prices within the hour, within the day, a day ahead or the day of is tricky. And it’s a whole industry and we are having to become adept at that. So we spent a lot of the last year really honing our trading skills and our predictive powers, and we’ve been pretty happy with the outcome there. Now we’re in the middle of building a project near League City, Texas, which is just south east of Houston and Galveston County, Texas.
And that project equipment’s being delivered, installed on site as we speak. It’s a much bigger project, 220 megawatts and on a much bigger site. It’s Texas. Everything’s bigger in Texas, but we’re in the middle of, and that’s been an interesting one. We’ve had weather challenges down there. We’ve had a port strike now we’ve got possible tariff things to deal with. Those batteries will all be in the country well before any tariffs were to kick in. But even with the Biden tariffs, there was a moment when those were announced when it was only on EVs, but the first day, if you remember, when those battery battery tariffs were announced by the Biden administration, it wasn’t obvious that they only applied to EVs. And we had just placed a very large order for batteries for this project when that got announced. And we were quite happy to learn that we weren’t subject to them.
But in that case, we’re doing what I mentioned before where we’re actually buying the batteries direct from an international manufacturer in a DC block configuration, and then we’re having to do the quote unquote integration. So we have a much larger scope this time for grid store to accomplish than in our first project. We’re hoping that that results in lower costs, which we can make us more competitive. And then we hope to be following that up with additional projects in 25, 26, 27 and beyond. We’re looking to expand beyond just California and Texas. Those are the two biggest markets in the US into other regions. We’re particularly interested in the rest of the west, outside of California, and also what’s called SPP or the Southwest Power Pool, which is kind of in the central north of Texas, that part of the country. We see a lot of demand in the West coming from all these states that have renewable energy mandates like California, that don’t want to build new gas, that want to turn off the fossil. They’re going to need more storage to get there. And then in the middle of the country, we see a lot of retiring fossil that’s just old and uneconomic, and we see a lot of growth from data centers, and we think that’ll create good markets for us as well.
Lara Pierpoint: And so as you’re thinking about these future projects, what are you thinking with respect to the most recent election and the potentially looming changes in the IRA and tariff structures and things like that? Are you taking a breath? Are you still moving forward? How do you proceed under the current level of uncertainty there?
Chris Taylor: At the end of the day, as you well know, the Department of Energy mostly cleans up old nuclear waste sites. They’re not really that involved in the day-to-day. So I don’t see that having a fracking executive in charge of DOE is probably not the end of the world for us. I think the way realistically, what we expect will happen is there will be an embrace of fossil fuel extraction and consumption. Like the new administration is drill, baby, drill and burn, baby burn, and we just have to accept that that is what it will be. Federal policy for the next few years. I think many states will do everything in their power to continue to push forward with climate transition. I think a lot of companies will too, but the federal government will not be leaning into that with us. That said, I think that load growth will probably increase under Trump.
If he’s successful in everything he wants to do, he will if we onshore manufacturing and do all these things that will drive up load growth, that will drive up the need for batteries. So I think the biggest risks to us are tariffs and getting this manufacturing supply chain into the United States. It’s a goal that we share. And I’m not just saying that that is unabashedly the right thing to do. It’s good for the economy, it’s good for politics, but doing it overnight isn’t feasible. It takes years to build these factories, and we want to not choke off this industry just as it’s getting started. And then the other piece is what do the Republicans and Trump try to do with IRA? Do they try to repeal portions of it? Do they try to tweak it, phase it out? That part I think is a little bit hard to know.
A lot of it depends on how they’re going to pay for the tax credits that he enacted in his first administration and he wants to extend, and whether tariffs are part of paying for that or something separate. So we are looking to de-risk our supply chain so that we have robust US supply options, but those are not likely to be viable until late 26 or early 27 realistically. And we’re talking to manufacturers in China about moving equipment prior to tariffs getting imposed. We’re talking to manufacturers about buying US equipment as soon as it’s available, and we’re talking to other parties about buying from countries that are not China or the us. So we’re looking at all three of those options, but we should be making this stuff in this country and we should buy it from here. And we support that.
Lara Pierpoint: Chris Taylor is the Chief Executive Officer of Gridstor. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me Lara Pierpoint. Our producer is Erin Hardick. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you’d like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to editors@latitudemedia.com. You can listen to The Green Blueprint at latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get podcasts. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the Clean Energy Economy.
