SunPower CEO issues statement on legislation on solar ITC

y T.J. Rodgers, Chairman and CEO, issued a statement regarding pending legislation to cancel or wind down the 30% solar Investment Tax Credit, which read in part, “The soaring Martin Luther King quote is appropriate to describe the great opportunity now offered to the solar industry and to SunPower, in particular to get the federal government out of our lives. In the chip business, I survived two waves of government subsidies, Sematech and the CHIPS and Science Act. These subsidies followed a downward spiral path of free money, money with added political strings, and finally money with numbing speed- and profit-killing regulations. My direct experience is that, like tariffs, government subsidies are bad and always harm the industry they intend to help. That’s because the strings force companies to build factories where they don’t want them, to follow building codes that dramatically increase cost and slow down building schedules, to adopt wage and work rules that make the workforce expensive and inflexible, and to cause the subsidized industry to get used to living on welfare and to become unable to compete with lean un-subsidized companies. That downward spiral is clearly demonstrated in my recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, which describes the cradle-to-grave record of the Sematech chip welfare program, now being replicated by the new CHIPS Act, which is giving away $280 billion of taxpayers’ money to some of the wealthiest corporations in the world – money that will be used for low-ROI projects that the companies themselves were unwilling to fund. Sematech was launched with its first $1 billion in 1987 and actually harmed All American semiconductor companies, Sematech members and non-members, based on my direct observations as the CEO of a chip company. This should serve as a warning to the solar industry to rapidly abandon the ITC solar welfare program. Last week we read that the congress worked “all night” on a bill to eliminate the solar investment tax credit. This type of erratic oversight has undermined the solar industry since at least 1978. Why would anyone spend years and vast sums to build a business that could be shut down by some ill-conceived government mandate, like tariff proposals that change weekly or congressional plans cooked up in all-night sessions? Washington’s exit from solar will be a great benefit to our industry, which should be lobbying for free markets, not subsidies. Yes, there will be a one-time hurdle, our customers’ loss of the 30% ITC tax credit they now receive for installing a solar system, but after that dislocation, the solar companies that survive will be able to hunker down and run their businesses properly. Some of my college classmates were sloppy about attending classes and studying hard – and had to do all-night cram sessions before exams. Some of those same C-students apparently got elected to Congress and still “pull all-nighters,” but now to create multi-billion dollar, thousand-page bills that they sign without ever having read them.”