President Joe Biden will be in Milwaukee at midday Tuesday. He's heading to the Ingeteam Corporation manufacturing site in the Menomonee Valley.
The President is expected to highlight clean energy investments that have been made since he signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) one year ago.
IRA is a wide-ranging law covering things like prescription drugs and deficit reduction. But during his Milwaukee visit to Ingeteam, Biden is expected to focus on some of the law's $370 billion in federal tax incentives for a national transition to cleaner energy.
The Spain-based company has been in Milwaukee for about a dozen years, making wind and solar energy system components. But Ingeteam's recent announcement to expand the production of faster chargers for electric vehicles has made it into a new report on clean energy projects from the non-partisan business group E2.
E2 says a pair of efforts from Alliant Energy in Sheboygan and Janesville also qualify, and so does a shipbuilding plan in Marinette related to wind turbines. Those are in districts represented by Republican House members.
In fact, of the 210 major new clean energy projects in the U-S that E2 tallies since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, most are in GOP areas.
UW-Milwaukee political scientist Kathleen Dolan says that's stunted some Republican opposition.
"If you remember during the passage of the legislation, there was talk about how rural areas of the country had largely been ignored in early climate efforts. And this bill tries to bring a little more parity or equity in the climate program," Dolan says.
But greater geographic parity doesn't necessarily mean the switch to clean energy will go smoothly.
During an E2 online news conference Monday, group member Jason Peace, with a lithium-ion battery manufacturer in the state of Georgia, FREYR Battery, said a lot of foreign companies had had a ten or 15-year head start on U.S. firms.
"The South Koreans, they've been in this space before. And I think you'll probably see more Chinese investments. The technologies, sometimes the intellectual property, the trade secrets and the know-how have been established for years in these countries," Peace says.
And even when U.S.-based companies can economically compete, there's the issue of finding enough trained workers. Ariel Fan founded GreenWealth Energy, a Los Angeles electric vehicle charging company.
"Just firsthand from what we're seeing, it's been very very hard to find electricians, especially as the world is moving and the country is moving toward every single building needs an EV charger," Fan says.
Fan says training programs in the Inflation Reduction Act are heavily regulated. But she says she supports the law and doesn't want to see it repealed, as some Republicans threaten.
"The jobs need to last and it's not like a band-aid solution where, 'Oh here's a grant program that pays into these workforce funds,' and then it's exhausted and that's it. That's why we need the IRA to stick around because we need these employers to keep these people employed," Fan says.
President Biden, hoping to keep his White House job for five more years, not only gets to promote the IRA law here, he gets to do it about a week before Republican presidential hopefuls hold a debate in Milwaukee and ramp up their effort to win Wisconsin, and the presidency in 2024.
