Speed vs. security: Scaling American clean energy in the shadow of Chinese supply chains

Ilaria Mazzocco
Thank you, Kyle. First, it might be helpful to clarify what we mean by clean energy technology because, especially in some situations, it gets very confusing.

There are two ways that people generally interpret this. One is deployment of technology, so how many solar panels have you installed, how many electric vehicles (EVs) do you have on the road, and so on. The other is how much of the stuff you are making is actually necessary to succeed in getting that stuff on the road or on the grid. And, how much of the value chain is actually located in your country? How much are you contributing? What’s the value added?

I think those are two separate but related questions, and China outperforms on both accounts. China has massive deployment of these technologies. If you look at solar, wind, EVs, and batteries, if you go through all the more mature technologies, you see China beating record after record and driving very large shares of the growth in the deployment of these globally. Then at the same time, they’re also making a lot of these technologies and increasingly becoming big exporters. So, they’re becoming increasingly important in other countries’ deployment of these technologies, which is part of the reason why we’re talking about this, because it is also creating trade issues and industrial policy issues for other countries.

I think it’s worth noting that the two things are interrelated. In most cases, the fact that China has such a big market is what has enabled the growth of that industry. At the same time, the growth of the domestic industry has then fed back into the growth of the market for these technologies.

So, it is very much linked, and that’s not always entirely understood. President Donald Trump recently talked about how the Chinese sell this stuff, but then they don’t use it. Actually, they use it very heavily. Most of the technologies—like solar panels, EVs, batteries—that the Chinese companies make are deployed in China, but then there’s also a very large share that is going abroad and is increasingly noted in foreign markets.

Now, the United States is a big market. So, in absolute terms, there has been quite a bit of deployment of these technologies, and there has been growth in manufacturing across some of these value chains. But, compared to China, it is far less developed in many cases, and, in terms of the value chains, there just isn’t that expansive presence of U.S. companies across the entire value chain, which we see in the case of China.

In other countries, it’s a similar story, right? And it really depends on the technology. If you look at companies in South Korea or Japan, you do have technological leaders—in batteries, for example—but you don’t necessarily always see the full stack across all clean tech. For example, South Korea also has very strong EV companies—for example, Hyundai—doing very interesting things.

The European Union is an interesting case. The deployment of technology has been a strategic necessity for Europe because of energy security, because of high energy costs, etc. This is why I emphasize the difference between deployment and manufacturing.

At the same time, they’ve also been trying to develop a domestic value chain. Like the United States, they do rely a lot on foreign direct investment. So, you have seen a lot of growth in the battery industry. You’ve seen a lot of growth in the EV industry.

In Europe, though, you see a lot of Chinese companies that are going into Europe and also building up factories, which I’m sure will be part of our conversation as well: What is the role of Chinese companies globally? You see it more and more that they’re becoming important in other countries’ industrial strategies as well.

Vanessa Sciarra
That’s a lot, but I’ll try to unpack it. Thanks so much for having me. This is really the kind of conversation we should be having a lot in the United States. This is not just for people in Washington; this is for everyone.

The bottom line that we should use as our operating premise is that energy demand used to be flat; for decades, we had a flat need for energy. That has changed, and the reason it’s changing is largely because of hyperscalers and data centers. So, our energy demand curves when we do our modeling are dramatically uphill. There’s just going to be a dramatic need for more energy generation.

I represent solar, wind, and battery companies. Frankly, my companies are the fastest to the grid in terms of energy generation. We can deploy more quickly and build projects faster than nuclear, geothermal, and even natural gas at this point, in most cases.

So, to meet demand and keep the United States on track in the AI race and in the tech races, you need a lot more energy than we generate today, or it’s going to get really expensive for consumers. So, you’ve got to come up with ways to put energy on the grid. Solar, wind, and batteries are an excellent way to do that at a cost price that really does meet the moment.

An interesting fact that we’ve noticed—and you will notice if you really pay attention to data center announcements—is that quite a number of them are announcing that they will produce their power with either solar or battery generation. Or they’re using those as a complement to other sources of energy, primarily because they’re getting a lot of pressure not to take energy off the grid, right? Because that’s what leads to a consumer price problem.

So, as you watch these announcements, they’re saying not only that we’re building this in this place with this many jobs, but we’re also going to provide power this way. That’s something I would suggest people start tracking because I think it’s a very interesting trend.

But you’re not wrong in terms of the capability gaps in getting where we want to be. So, the chains are different. I’ll start with wind. Onshore wind specifically is a great American success story. That industry started moving out of China and other places in Asia about 15 years ago, and today, in the United States, we make wind turbines that are 60% to 70% U.S. content, made entirely with U.S. steel, melt and pour—exactly what steel workers would want to see. Really, it’s an American product with a limited amount of imported components.

That is something that people don’t understand and, frankly, that’s probably our fault; I’m not sure we’ve been clear enough about that. We import less than 1% of our wind towers, and the wind towers you see all across Iowa and the Midwest, the Dakotas, are all American. They’re built by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) that are based in America, with American workers, and it’s a great story to tell.

Solar and batteries are newer to the table on the manufacturing side. We increasingly make solar modules in the United States, and we increasingly make energy storage batteries here. Like most new industries, you tend to start at the end product, and you import a lot of components. Then, over time, you start to have suppliers who can supply the components, and you work your way upstream to the more commodity-type products.

On solar, we are doing pretty well. We have one big problem. It’s not a big secret. We need to figure out a way to make our U.S. polysilicon. We have plenty of capacity on U.S. polysilicon production, but we send it overseas, primarily to Asia, to be made into ingots and wafers, and then it comes back to be made into cells and modules. That is a supply chain problem that the industry is trying to figure out how to solve. The problem with that particular piece of the supply chain is high capital expenditure to build the factory, and, frankly, the machinery and the expertise are in Asia. So, that’s a problem: the solar supply chain.

In batteries, we have a similar problem. We are really good at building them and getting them ready to add to the mix, and they are a great resource because they can help not only solar, but also gas generation. But the problem is the precursors, right? Lithium iron phosphate batteries are made with lithium and graphite, and all of the processed graphite, almost all of it, and a lot of the processed lithium, is coming from Asia, with a lot of it coming from China.

So again, it’s an upstream issue that we have to solve for. Increasingly, we are trying to figure out how to get that processing in the United States or in allied nations where we feel we have a resilient and secure supply chain, where we can count on those supply chains to withstand geopolitical tensions.

So, again, you’re not wrong. As you look across technology, it does matter which technology you’re talking about and where the problems are. I will just say that the industry is intensely focused on this. We spend pretty much all our time these days thinking about how to solve these problems and how to manage the tariffs that are being put, increasing, on inputs.

We use a lot of steel and aluminum. And the steel tariffs are devastating to anyone in U.S. manufacturing. They’re a high tariff; they cover tons of products. It’s been an increasing list. It’s even hard to stay on top of it. So that’s been a big headwind for us and a lot of U.S. manufacturers.

Samantha Gross
Kyle, thank you for inviting me to the conversation. I’d like to start by going back to some of the politics around this. For a long time in the United States, we’ve been focused on energy independence: The fact that everything we do should be within our borders, and particularly in this administration, you see a focus on the idea of trading good old American fossil fuels—we’re the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas—exchanging them for Chinese supply of clean energy equipment.

And we really need to change the way we think about that. This administration may not be serious about climate change, but the rest of the world is, and we are going to get back to being serious about climate change because it’s real. What we don’t want to do is back away from the future in terms of our energy policy. Previous administrations have been focused more on an all-of-the-above policy, whereas what we see right now is more of a fossil fuel-focused policy.

The United States is taking the future and handing it over to our friends in Asia and in other places, and that has a number of real-world consequences. One obvious one is cost, as Vanessa very rightly pointed out. Wind and solar with batteries are some of the least expensive sources of electricity today, and they’re also some of the fastest ones to build.

When you talk to hyperscalers and say, what is it that determines how quickly you can get a facility built, one of the things that is rate-determining for them is power and time to power. And here in the United States, you want to think of natural gas. Oh, we have a ton of it. We should just do this all with natural gas.

But one of the problems with that is turbines. The waiting period to get a gas turbine is years. GE Renova, for instance, has an order book that goes out to 2029. So, great, you might have the natural gas, but I hope you’ve already ordered that turbine if you want the power anytime soon. And so, there’s a time cost to this focus on fossil fuels.

Economically speaking, maybe some of the very basic manufacturing is going to stay in China. But the United States has typically been very good about developing new technology here, and I want to see us continue to do that. We have the best universities in the world. Our national labs are the envy of the world. You want to see us continuing to push on clean energy there, such that the next generation of solar, the next battery chemistry, new generation nuclear or geothermal—those can and probably should all be developed here. You want to see the administration focus on those, not just on fossil fuels.

And to their credit, they have definitely focused on new nuclear, but you want to see them focusing on all these things because this has traditionally been a really strong point of the United States and something that we’re very good at.

I am concerned about some of the politics around this, beyond any climate politics. Our permitting delays are real. It is very difficult to build anything in this country right now on a bipartisan basis. If you cornered your congressmen and said, do we need permitting reform? They would almost universally say yes. The challenge is getting them to agree on what that reform looks like and finding a place of compromise.

But if we’re going to build a growing manufacturing economy—the hyperscalers with their new data centers, the growing electricity grid—any movement toward cleaner energy and a cleaner economy means more electricity. All of these things require permitting reform. And so finding a way to bring those parties together to get the thing that we all agree that we want and need in terms of permitting reform is a really important area of what should honestly be bipartisan agreement.

Vanessa Sciarra
Can I just pick up on that, Kyle? Because that’s such a great point. So, we’re all in on permitting reform. We’ve spent a ton of political capital on it. We’re working with the American Petroleum Institute and others to try to get a tech-neutral solution. Because we all agree across nuclear, petroleum, and our stuff, if you could just come up with permitting that was fair and fast and didn’t have so many bumps, lots of people would benefit from it. And making it political just splits up caucuses, and then you don’t have enough votes basically to move it forward. So that’s a huge issue for us. It’s a hard problem for Congress to manage when you’re trying to build bipartisan consensus.

But everything Samantha said, 100%, we’re all on board with that. If you can’t build it because you can’t get a permit, the capital’s going to flow somewhere else. People aren’t going to wait around while you figure that out.

Another point she made that I’d like to emphasize is about the factory floor. I didn’t know much about this until I started representing solar, battery, and wind manufacturers, but innovation happens on the factory floor. That’s where people develop the new ideas. What we need to get better at is incentivizing that manufacturing and then protecting the innovations.

We’ve been really good about giving the world everything. We’ve been very generous, the Americans in the post-World War II economy. I think we’ve learned that maybe that is not necessarily the best way to treat our intellectual property innovations.

I’ll take solar as a good example. The next generation of solar is being developed right now. What we are currently installing will not be state-of-the-art in 10 years. There’ll be something better in terms of the yield that you get from the sun shining on the panels. But that’ll happen when people are building it and thinking about how to make it better.

It happens when people are actually tinkering with stuff as they manufacture it. That is a great American tradition, dating back to cars and all the other wonderful things we make. That is only going to happen if you have a robust manufacturing environment. We’re starting to see that. We have it in wind; we’re starting to see it in solar and batteries.

The more we can incentivize that type of manufacturing, the more likely we are to be at the forefront of the breakthrough technologies, particularly in energy storage. For batteries and solar, you’re on the cusp of a whole new generation of technological developments there. We want to capture those.

Vanessa Sciarra
This is something we work on every day at American Clean Power. But here’s the sad truth: Over many decades, the United States ceded technological innovation in clean energy largely to China. If you look back at the history of solar and battery, you will find sadly that much of that was developed at U.S. research and development universities.

We came up with a lot of the ideas that would allow us to do these things. But we shared them, or in some cases, they were stolen from us. And now we don’t really have the cutting-edge technology window that we had. We were sort of ahead of everyone. Now we’re a little behind.

But I constantly get this question from people: Why don’t we just completely decouple from Chinese innovation and start from scratch? We don’t have time. We don’t have time to go back and figure out how to build a completely ground-up new solar panel and a completely ground-up battery, not if we want to be deploying while we’re innovating. So, the truth is, and this is something that people have a little bit of trouble stomaching sometimes, we do need to get tech transfer to some extent from some of the Chinese companies.

Interestingly enough, it’s not necessarily only Chinese companies. It’s increasingly Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, and other companies. You see this across multiple manufacturing sectors, not just for us obviously, but autos, semiconductors, and such. But this idea that we should just close the borders and make it all at home in our backyard, it’s just not feasible.

We will be so far behind the rest of the world that we will be at a real disadvantage, like Samantha pointed out. We’ll be the only ones who aren’t doing some of the things that we should be doing, at a grave societal cost to the U.S. population.

So, the question then becomes, if you’re going to allow some Chinese investment, some Chinese tech machinery, and some Chinese technology, what are your guardrails? And, I would say we have an example that we’re living through right now in the One Big Beautiful Bill. And it has to do with FEOC, or “foreign entity of concern,” restrictions and PFEs, or “prohibited foreign entities.” If you are not familiar with those acronyms, they’re good ones to know. They come up a lot in conversations about this.

In the bill, there were a lot of instructions to the Treasury Department about how to guardrail Chinese investment in manufacturing and in deployment of our technologies—specifically, wind, solar, and batteries—in order to make sure that, under Congress’ view of the world, we didn’t cede too much control of that ecosystem to Chinese capital, to Chinese ownership, to Chinese licensing agreements that were not really licensing agreements. In some cases, they’re much more detailed than that. They have a lot of other strings to them. So, there’s a lot of discussion right now. The Treasury last week came out with the first official set of guidance rules on this. There’s much to come. It’s a very complicated topic.

A lot of conversations are going on between Treasury and affected industries to figure out what this is supposed to look like. But that conversation needs to be had, right? As a political matter, we need to decide what level of Chinese involvement we’re willing to have. On the Hill, it’s gotten very political. So, unfortunately, when we’re seeing legislative ideas from the Hill, they tend to be not as nuanced and much more generally, if you’re talking about, for example, battery manufacturing, no one who has anything to do with this company can be active in the United States, let’s just blacklist these companies.

And I think that’s dangerous, right? To say that a whole company needs to be blacklisted. I mean, if you have reason to think that they’re engaging in industrial espionage or something, obviously. But if you’re just saying because they’re Chinese headquartered, we don’t want to have anything to do with them, I think you need to be careful about that because there is a lot of tech transfer that’s happening. In many cases, it’s being negotiated very carefully so that the tech is being transferred completely and there is a complete severing of the parties after a certain period of time, once payment has been made, or a certain amount of time has gone by. Increasingly, my companies are getting very careful at how they negotiate these things to make sure that they can decouple themselves from a parent company or a licensor. I think that’s the trend that we’re seeing in the industry.

So, I would say the answer is it’s a super nuanced, difficult thing to do, but we should be doing it because it’s really almost impossible to conceive of how we stay in this race if we start saying, we’re just going to do it all at home, we’re going to start from scratch. We’re too far behind.

Ilaria Mazzocco
Vanessa is absolutely right, but I also wanted to just underscore how advanced Chinese companies are. It’s absolutely true that a lot of these technologies were invented at some point in the United States. It’s not always clear that they would’ve progressed in the same way had there not been the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem that, Kyle, you are such an expert on. It’s just the types of cost and efficiency that we see today across these technologies—it’s just not entirely clear that we would’ve even gotten there.

I think that really underscores the problem that still exists: that gap in the United States between the innovation in the lab, getting it in the factory, and then getting it to the market. This has been an issue for all these technologies in the United States and continues to be an issue. So, coming back to the issue I talked about before, you have to have a market for these things. If you can’t deploy them because you can’t build new things in the United States and you don’t have the factories that can produce them at scale and reduce the cost, you’re not going to have progress. Even today, if you look at solar technology, for example, China is already doing much better in terms of innovation because they are already leaders in perovskite or tandem solar panels, for example.

And on batteries, again, Chinese companies are already moving very fast in solid state batteries, but also, they have been able to commercialize and bring LFP batteries, lithium ion and phosphate batteries, to a whole new level, which many didn’t expect was possible.

And so, we know that a lot of these technologies are also a stack, and they’re very compatible across a variety of different technologies. So, we want to have some capabilities or some deployment of these technologies because they enable other types of innovation. Batteries have applications that go well beyond cars. They obviously can be applied to the grid, but they also have defense sector applications.

So, if you want batteries, then you need to have some other capabilities. EVs are very complementary with autonomous driving, but also with a whole slew of other software-based innovations that are really important for artificial intelligence. So, there are all these interlinked innovations, some of which have very little to do with climate change, that actually matter quite a bit, and that China is making progress on because it has rapid deployment of these technologies, and increasingly it’s deploying them also abroad. So, it’s gaining more and more.

Also, what we’re seeing is, outside the United States, a lot of companies are trying to tap into that know-how and that Chinese technology and integrating it within their systems to then innovate further. And so, I think there’s this real question, and I think Samantha and Vanessa can respond to this, that there is this question of, how much do you want of the current technology versus how much do you want to invest in the next generation technology? And how much of the current technology do you need in order to succeed in the next generation?

And so, if the current technology is already dominated by Chinese companies, you may as well acquire some of that, of course, with all the carefulness that you need and being very conscious of the risks that may be involved, but how much do you need in order to then succeed in leapfrogging and being a leader in the next generation?

And I think that’s a real question. I don’t think it’s really fully explored, and there’s a lot of politicization—this entire nexus between further innovation across different sectors with current capabilities, plus investing in the next generation, that would allow us to become less dependent on China, and how that all interlinks and plays in together. But frankly speaking, if you’re not investing at all, putting barriers, blocking any new technology, you’re not going to succeed in the next generation or in deploying the current generation of these new technologies.

And you might just be stuck with a technology that nobody else is going to be using in a few years. Or rather, other countries will be using them, but it’s not necessarily the frontier technology that they are all going to be pushing. So, I think that’s sort of the real risk that the United States is facing right now.

Samantha Gross
Given the current climate in the United States today, we need to remove some of this discussion from the discussion about climate change. This is about industrialization. It’s about time to power. It’s about costs. It’s about a lot of things that are actually bipartisan.

I care about climate change, but you don’t have to care about climate change for many of these investments to be a very good idea. And I feel like it gets caught up in the partisan politics sometimes in a way that it doesn’t need to. That innovation and reinvigorating American manufacturing are just good things to do, no matter what party you sit in or where you sit on climate change.

Ilaria Mazzocco
Yeah, absolutely. It’s quite interesting, and I think one thing to keep in mind is that what most countries want, and what most countries are pursuing, is foreign direct investment from China. What many of them want is some sort of technology transfer. They want to acquire some of that industrial know-how and technology.

Different segments, different types of objectives, depending on the country, because this includes both countries with very advanced innovation ecosystems, like the European Union, as well as countries in the Global South that are still trying to catch up in some other ways: Brazil, India, etc. I think it’s a little early to tell what’s going to be successful because most countries are really interested in a strategically important technology, such as batteries. That’s really one of the key objectives. And these factories are just coming online. The tech transfer process takes a decade or more, and it’s really difficult to measure. I think in many ways, we also forget how challenging it was for China to acquire technologies through technology transfer.

That’s worth keeping in mind. And so, it’s hard to know exactly what’s going to be the successful model, but it is interesting to see how different countries are thinking about this and engaging with the issue in ways that may be a little more proactive than the United States.

In some cases, these countries don’t necessarily have a choice. The European Union already has those investments in place. So, you see the European Commission coming out regularly with new strategies, rules, etc. that are aiming to increase the value added within Europe, the European know-how, and new ideas, like maybe we should be encouraging the machinery to be owned by the European company, or the management needs to be European citizens.

They don’t always have the authority to actually implement these things. And it’s often at the country level, and some countries, for example, Hungary, may not care that much about the European targets. So, in some ways, the United States would actually have a lot more leverage than some of these other countries.

But I don’t think the United States is necessarily engaging with that question in the same way because this has become a very political issue. And I think there’s been this overarching national security priority of just decoupling or reducing all linkages with China overall, rather than thinking, is there something we can gain from them?

Ultimately, even when you look at a country like India, which, like the United States, has been very skeptical of Chinese investment because of national security concerns, they have been quite pragmatic, for example, when it comes to importing some components that then can allow them to have more Indian companies.

For example, allowing more Chinese battery imports so that Indian OEMs can then produce really competitive EVs. They are succeeding at making really nice, cheap EVs, but those do rely on Chinese batteries at the moment. There are longer-term objectives than localizing that value chain. But I think there are very different ways that everybody’s thinking about it. It is quite a complex ecosystem, and it is a very shifting environment. I think it is still too early to tell exactly who’s going to be successful.

In part, that also has to do with the country itself. Do they have the ecosystem to actually produce that successfully? It might not have that much to do with the Chinese company, but more with the host country as well.

Vanessa Sciarra
Ilaria makes a great point. Someone told me something very interesting a few years ago when I was new to this sector: Do you think the Chinese are selling you the best stuff? They’re not selling you the next-gen stuff. They’re selling you last year’s model. And that’s one of the reasons they’re so willing to let you buy it and take the tech. I heard someone, a Chinese-adjacent person, tell me, they just don’t think you can do much with it, so they’re happy to sell you this stuff.

Because they just don’t think Americans will be able to really take it to the next level. Are we able to do that? Their ecosystem is different. In their ecosystem, lots of people will fail, but one will succeed, and that’s enough. And that’s not the way a free-market economy works.

Another point to mention is that this isn’t an issue for some countries. They’re never going to be a manufacturing superpower. There are so many small nations in the world; they’re happy to buy the cheapest solar panels, the cheapest wind, the cheapest batteries. They’re just trying to get their grid serving their population. And there’s a good percentage of countries in the world where that’s the most important political imperative.

They’re never going to have a homegrown ecosystem to innovate and build these things. The United States is very unique in that regard. So, I think when you look at the world, and you look at Chinese dominance, you have to take into account that some of that is with countries that just would never be able to produce their own clean energy manufacturing ecosystem.

Samantha Gross
I would start back at my original point that I think energy independence is an unreasonable goal, and so I am a fan of interactive ecosystems, of friend-shoring, of working with other countries, with their respective competitive advantages.

We here in the United States have a ton of competitive advantages. The intellectual advantages of our universities and such, but also the fact that we’re a vast country with a lot of resources of our own, both mineral resources, fossil resources, and also land space. We have space to build a lot of renewables here.

Vanessa Sciarra
Drive across West Texas. Look at all the wind turbines and ask how many countries in the world could do that.

Samantha Gross
Yeah, exactly. We have a lot of natural advantages in the realm of clean energy here that we should take advantage of.

On the other hand, it can be a more difficult place to build things like mines or refining facilities for various materials. Those may be things that we want to work on with our friends and allies to develop those facilities. China has a gigantic head start on this, and we here are often focused on sourcing the minerals themselves without thinking hard enough about the fact that we have a mine for rare earths, let’s say, and then we’re selling it into the Chinese monopsony to refine it.

We need to think about the whole value chain. But I am certainly a fan of cooperation on this. We don’t have the greatest competitive advantage in everything. And ultimately, if our goal is to move the world forward on clean energy for a lot of reasons, not just climate ones, this is something that we’re going to need to do together.

I have an interesting opinion on where China has gone with this. I’m of two minds, and they’re both correct. You see what state capitalism has been able to do in China in terms of developing these industries. They’ve sunk a ton of money into it, and they’ve brought costs down for everyone. God bless China for bringing down the cost of solar panels to a tiny fraction of what it was a decade ago. And a lot of that is China’s attitude, as Vanessa said: we’ll make a lot of investments, and if one works, we’re cool with that.

The flip side of that is: how dare China use its state capitalism to monopolize all these different industries? They have taken control of refining many of these minerals to the exclusion of others. They are pricing some minerals in ways that are meant to crowd out the competition. And so, fighting that downside of Chinese state capitalism in this space is something that the United States, as big as it is, is not going to be able to do on its own.

We’re going to need friends in mineral-rich countries. We’re going to need friends around the world to think about how we can work together to find our own source of advantage in this. Because the Chinese do have a head start, and some of that head start has been good for the world. Emissions are lower than they would otherwise be if it weren’t for the investments that the Chinese have made.

But we also don’t want to sell the future over to the Chinese, and that is going to require cooperation across not just technology and some of the resources, which the United States is good at, but other parts of the value chain and manufacturing, mining, and refining. And some of those may be best done in other countries.

So, I realize I’m not being super technology specific. I’m thinking more about various sources of competitive advantage in different parts of the value chain, but it’s not something that the United States is going to be able to do alone. And honestly, it’s not something that China has done alone either. If you look at Chinese dominance, it’s not all happening within Chinese borders. Much of that is Chinese companies making investments in other places. And if we, being the West, want to compete with that, we’re going to have to behave in the same way.

Vanessa Sciarra
Yeah, just picking up on that. I did a lot of traveling when I worked for the government, and there are other countries where mining is a good job.

And in this country, if you ask many people, they’ll be like, I’m not going to send my kids to work in a mine. Historically, we have had a very complicated relationship with mining. We haven’t amended our mining law in like 100 years.

So, we may be able to fix that over time, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t. But in the meantime, it’s interesting when you talk to some of our most important strategic partners: there are a ton of mining jobs in Canada, Australia, Chile, and Mexico. They are proud countries and think of mining as fundamental to their sovereign identities, to who they are as a country. That’s where mining innovations are happening, where mine safety is being developed. You talk to people in those countries, they’re proud of their mining tradition, they’re proud of those industries. It’s not necessarily a good idea to upset those people.

If we are going to have a constructive conversation about critical minerals, you want to have a relationship with someone who is not only doing this every day in a way that is not destroying the environment, in a way that is being safe for the people who are asked to do this work, but who is also innovating.

You have to have those relationships, and this administration has struggled with that. Its friends are friends sometimes, and then they’re not friends before becoming friends again. That’s created some real problems in our long-term relationships with some of our most important allies.

But it’s important to be honest with ourselves about what other countries have a competitive advantage in. And I would say in the mining space, there’s a lot of competitive advantage outside the United States, in other places with which we have a very strong relationship. I would include Europe in that as well.

Ilaria probably knows, but in Eastern Europe and parts of Scandinavia, there’s a lot of mining expertise and a willingness to take on the challenges of refining, which is really a dirty, hard business to run.

Samantha Gross
I would add: we can outcompete the Chinese in some ways by offering quite different business terms than Chinese investors. The Chinese often want to bring in some of their own workers, and they bring in other disadvantages that we don’t have to. We can actually cut some of these folks a better deal. We have sources of competitive advantage in that space, but we have to choose to use them.

Ilaria Mazzocco
There’s also a question of what the real priority is. There’s a variety of different goals that are all worthy of being pursued, but there should probably be a hierarchy, right?

That can help define where reshoring on U.S. soil or U.S. ownership of the asset is more of a priority compared to other areas. It’s become extremely clear over the past 12 months that for rare earths or critical minerals, there can be real liabilities when the entire value chain is concentrated in China, right? So, that’s a national security priority. And I completely agree that collaborating with allies to achieve a more secure and resilient supply chain would be in the U.S. interest.

There are other areas where there may be benefits for U.S. jobs, to a certain extent, and having some of the manufacturing in the United States. But there, the actual risks to national security, even economic security, are much lower. Solar panels are generally my example. Being cut off from a supply of something along the value chain of solar panels is not really going to hurt U.S. national interests. It’s not like an oil embargo. It’s just not the same sort of thing. So, there may be benefits to having the value chains in the United States, but it’s not going to be the No. 1 national security priority.

Having that clear idea of where priorities should lie also gives you a template of where your resources should be going, right? And credit where credit’s due, this administration has been very focused on critical minerals. Now, you know, it’s a complicated issue; it’s not an issue that’s going to be solved in the near term. Unfortunately, that’s something that’s going to require multiple years of sustained engagement and focus. So, we’ll see how that goes.

There’s going to be a variety of different answers for different technologies and various segments for different technologies that really depend on what your priority at the federal level is. And it depends also on your allies’ priorities and how you can potentially collaborate with them.

The biggest strategic advantage the United States has over China is its ally system, right? China has nothing equivalent. We talk about China-Russia, China-North Korea, or Iran. They are nothing comparable to the sort of alliance system that the United States has with its treaty allies.

Of course, this is evolving, but there are economic advantages to that security alliance that still exist. That would be worth remembering and leveraging.

Vanessa Sciarra
Well, I think we need to have real conversations and not just photo ops. I was a trade negotiator at the U.S. Trade Representative. It’s really hard work to sit down and write—not in social media, but in writing—an agreement that you believe will be binding in some way on the parties and will have the right incentives. You have to create incentives that make it worthwhile for both parties to stay at the table.

That is a lot of work, and it takes a lot of people. You can’t just have cabinet secretaries do it. You need career people who really know how to sit down and do these things, and we’ve seen a certain amount of hollowing out of that space, of senior career civil servants, particularly in the trade area.

Another thing, there are risks to importing things from China. And I’m not going to hide the ball because I’m in critical infrastructure. We build power grids. There are concerns about places where there are potential vulnerabilities. We’re not unaware of that.

My favorite example, as Ilaria pointed out, is that a solar panel cannot be controlled. A solar panel is dead. It’s a dumb piece of equipment. An inverter can be controlled. So, you need to think about what technology you’re worried about, what could be embedded in that thing that you bought from China or another place, and ask yourself, “How am I going to solve for that?”

That is something we need to work on with allies. If we had a common understanding of where those vulnerabilities were, and it was across multiple allied purchasers who are purchasing things in the global market, that would be helpful as well, because there is a danger that electricity grids could be compromised.

If electricity goes down, it’s disastrous. That is something we spend a lot of time worrying about. The industry is very concerned, and we have engineers who know how to take these things apart and figure out what might be in them. And how to make sure that we don’t buy things that have bad things in them. But that’s something we could work with allies on and share that information with, rather than having the allied country try to figure it out.

Sharing that information just makes it so everyone gets faster to the end point. If you all agree that this particular type of product is easily compromised, maybe we don’t import this; we build this amongst ourselves and trade it. But I do think the risk piece here on critical infrastructure is not wrong; I just think it gets so much attention relative to all the other problems we have, and industry is working very hard to solve those problems.

Samantha Gross
Yeah, I just want to add a point that is, this administration has forgotten that win-win solutions are possible. We’re always thinking about winning this or that situation without a broader strategy and without thinking about the fact that there are economic solutions that can make both parties better off.

And so, Vanessa’s point about the hollowing out of the career officials who do this kind of work really plays into this. We need an administration that understands that “America First” is not America alone, and that there are win-win solutions that can be had, especially when you’re dealing with allies and partners who have different strengths than we do.

It’s incredibly important to understand that there are deals that can make everyone better off. It’s not just beating the person across the table.