Analysts say that Trump’s commercial wars will harm the entire American energy sector, from oil to solar energy

Why this conflict happens? The short version is that Trump and its advisers believe that the customs tariff will help the American economy by encouraging the construction of factories here, reducing the trade deficit and punishing barriers to entering American products in other countries.

“We will form our local industrial base,” Trump said in a speech on April 2. “We will open open foreign markets and break foreign trade barriers, and in the end, it will mean more production at home stronger competition and lower prices for consumers.”

The tariff is a tax imposed by a government on imports. Since the United States government has increased the tariffs of definitions, other countries have retaliated their own increases.

In addition to chaos is that policies often change, with the president often declaring transformations on social media, as happened in the last days after that Definitions on the European Union.

I spoke with Chris Sibel, Vice Chairman of the Wood McKinsey Board of Power and Renewal, to move on the parts of the report dealing with renewable energy sources. Here is the conversation, which was edited for length and clarity:

Dan Gearino: For renewable energy industries, is the big problem that makes the customs tariff everything more expensive, or is there more than that?

Chris Sibel: Certainly, things became more expensive than it. I think the second challenge, and this is a kind of unique for energy, is that there is a heavy hand for organization. Thus, there are a lot of auxiliary tools that have to go through large -scale organizational operations to obtain approval of what they want to build. Being in a world where there is a lot of uncertainty in customs tariffs, they do not know what will cost to build what they want to build. It is especially difficult for this industry to be able to move in it, and affects the sources of renewable energy more than, for example, other sectors such as gas or coal, because we rely on equipment imports to a greater degree, especially for storing batteries, as we depend mainly at this stage on imports from China.

With the battery storage, there was an attempt to increase the manufacturing capacity in the United States. How to distinguish where this stands?

Very early days. Many of the manufacture of batteries in the United States aims to provide batteries for EV vehicles, not a facilities storage. Consequently, the amount of manufacturing capacity compared to what is the demand for this equipment that leads to our import well more than 90 percent of what we need.

Chris Sibel is the Vice Chairman of the Wood McKinsey Board of Power and Renewable Energy.

Photo: Mackenzie wood