By Sarah Melotte and Elizabeth Miller for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for Georgia News Connection for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration
When Olivia Amyette was still a teenager, her grandfather suffered a stroke from which he would never recover. Her need to stay by his side during the worst of the Covid pandemic pushed her into a path after college that led to remarkable success as a clean energy entrepreneur in rural Georgia, where the sector is booming.
“I was very close with my grandpa. He was my best friend,” said Amyette. “I have him in my heart as I work.”
When Amyette went off to college to study computer science at Georgia Tech, she’d spend the weekends back home in Lawrenceville, a suburb of Atlanta, taking care of her grandfather. When it was time to graduate, Amyette worried she wouldn’t find a job in the tech industry that was close enough to home. It was the height of the pandemic and too much travel would put her vulnerable grandfather at greater risk of Covid.
That’s when Amyette decided to start her own business.
“With the flexibility that comes with being an entrepreneur, I was able to get the closure that I needed,” Amyette said. “We were all there when he passed away. It was very peaceful.”
Jobs and business growth in carbon-free power and other green technologies is stimulating economies across rural Georgia, which is among the frontrunner states attracting these industries. That growth is leading to a scramble to find quality, affordable housing and add other infrastructure to accommodate booming workforces.
The industry’s growth is being fostered in large part by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a sweeping spending bill central to President Joe Biden’s economic legacy that aimed to curb inflation and address climate change and healthcare costs, among other things.
“The overall success of the company would not really be likely if the IRA wasn’t in place,” said Amyette. “It drives the demand for solar.”
Amyette is the owner of two companies, Infinite Energy Advisors, a solar energy company in Cleveland, Georgia, a small town about an hour and a half northeast of Atlanta, and the Solar Knowledge Institute (SKI), a workforce development program that prepares workers for careers in the solar industry.
“I want to make sure that people of all backgrounds have access to high paying jobs, and solar’s a great field for that,” said Amyette. “It puts a lot of money in the workers’ pockets.”
Georgia’s Green Energy Sector Booms
Solar panel manufacturer QCells employs nearly 1,800 people in Dalton, Georgia, the center of a small metropolitan area in North Georgia, where it produces 30,000 solar panels a day, said company spokesperson Marta Stoepker. The company employs another 750 workers at a plant in the nearby town of Cartersville, population 23,100.
“We have people that come in right from high school, ready to learn,” said Stoepker. “But we also employ folks in highly technical positions, like engineers.”
Stoepker said a 2024 expansion at the Cartersville plant was powered largely by the IRA , which created tax credits to incentivize the domestic manufacturing of clean energy products. Stoepker said those tax credits gave QCells the confidence to increase their investments in solar. In addition to producing finished solar panels, the Cartersville facility also manufactures some of the materials that go into making the panels, like semiconductive wafers.
When the Cartersville plant is fully operational, Stoepker said QCells expects to produce 8.4 gigawatts of solar in Georgia, a power equal to about 16 million solar panels. In Waynesboro, Georgia, the Vogtle nuclear plant is capable of producing nearly 5 gigawatts, by comparison.
Amyette’s Infinite Energy Advisors also benefited from tax incentives brought on by the IRA.
That’s because the IRA expanded the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for certain clean energy projects, providing a credit for a portion of the cost to install a solar-energy system, whether it’s a rooftop array on a home or a large solar farm. The incentive provides tax credits from about a quarter to a third during the coming decade.
Unlike some other states, Georgia doesn’t offer consumers one-to-one net metering, a system that provides homes and businesses with solar panels a direct credit for every bit of energy that’s added to the power grid, which provides a powerful incentive in other states to invest in clean energy.
In Georgia, businesses like Amyette’s rely more heavily on tax incentives to grow solar investments.
“If it wasn’t for the tax credit, I would probably say 90% of our clients wouldn’t make that move to get solar,” Amyette said.
Georgia ranked in the top five states in the nation for total clean investment from early 2023 to early 2024, with more than half of that $12.4 million going to manufacturing facilities, according to the Clean Investment Monitor, a database of clean energy and climate technology investment projects in the United States assembled by MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization.
That investment has created at least 17,421 clean energy jobs across the state, according to Climate Power, a nonprofit that tracks clean energy spending and employment. Rural Georgia has seen 13 projects resulting in over $2.23 billion invested and 3,479 jobs created in the two years since the IRA was enacted.
The IRA also supports local economies by creating workforce development opportunities to train future employees in the clean energy sector. That’s part of what made SKI, Amyette’s new workforce development business, a successful venture.
“The Solar Knowledge Institute grew out of what we at Infinite Energy Advisors saw as major struggles within the workforce and major gaps in how we can effectively address the demand for solar,” said Amyette.
SKI is the only apprenticeship program with a specific focus on solar energy construction that’s registered with the Georgia Department of Labor. SKI offers a two-year, 4,000-hour apprenticeship program, which includes a combination of classroom instruction and on the job learning. They also provide a-la-carte courses in topics such as sales, allowing students to tailor their education to their specific interest.
Apprentices are assigned a mentor for the duration of the program, something Amyette said is essential for developing a skilled workforce in the industry. Since it launched in 2022, SKI has trained about 24 individuals, half of whom came from the Cleveland area.
Rural Georgia Experiences Growing Pains
Many of these new investments are landing in communities where they’ll have an outsized impact. Between the QCells Plant and the Hyundai factory, Cartersville is expected to see 5,750 new jobs.
In Dalton, QCells provided economic diversity to a town that had once been a hub for construction and flooring businesses, but whose economy was devastated during the 2008 recession.
“It’s changed the whole character and texture of the community in Dalton,” said Mark McLaurin, with Climate Power, a strategic climate communications organization. “This is a place that was like a black hole for jobs, but now they’ve opened this huge facility that’s really kind of breathed life into this community.”
Dalton residents were excited about the job growth brought on by QCells, said Carl Campbell, executive director of the Dalton Whitfield Joint Development Authority and the vice president of economic development for the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce.
“It was a good fit for us,” said Campbell.
He said QCells hired 600 people within the first six months of opening their Dalton plant.
“But we’re a little bit behind on housing,” said Campbell. “We don’t have those large scale home builders you see in bigger communities.”
New homes are being bought up and leased as soon as they’re available, according to Campbell. A lot of the newcomers had been commuting to Dalton and only recently were able to buy a house in the community.
As much as the solar industry in Georgia is flourishing, the state is seeing an even greater share of investment in zero-emission vehicles. The state has attracted more than a dozen manufacturing projects for electric vehicles, school buses, and batteries since 2018, according to the Clean Investment Monitor.
That data doesn’t even include a Rivian plant proposed on a 2,000-acre parcel, which the automotive company initially expected to bring into production for its long-range electric SUVs by the end of this year, a plan that’s currently on hold. Georgia’s new Rivian plant will land on a site where four counties meet, and a joint development authority pooled land from all four to create the footprint for a sizable manufacturing facility expected to create 7,500 jobs.
“My community doesn’t have 7,500 people, let alone 7,500 jobs,” said Monica Callahan, planning and development director for the nearby city of Madison, “That can be quite daunting to a planner—certainly a rural planner.”
Rapid jobs growth puts these communities in the challenging position of trying to figure out how to provide sufficient housing. Rural parts of the state already have experienced problems with housing quality, availability, and affordability.
“You present people with what rent is affordable based on typical wages paid in the community and how that matches up with the rents in the community or homeownership, what it would take to buy a home, and there’s genuine surprise,” said Kim Skobba, a professor at the University of Georgia’s Housing and Demographics Research Center. “Like, ‘Oh, right, we do have a problem.’”
Skobba’s research, including a survey of 164 decision-makers in rural, small town Georgia, found community leaders often aren’t aware of the constraints in their rental housing supply, or how lower-income residents might be affected.
Other services, from schools to hospitals to broadband internet access, can also all be limited.
Within Madison, most of the vacant land zoned for residential development is owned by just four or five property owners—and they’re not selling. The city won’t provide sewer services outside city limits and requires anyone with a septic system to be on at least 1.25 acres, making for steep land costs for any new housing.
So most of the housing is expected to be built closer to Atlanta and Augusta, each of which are about an hour’s drive away.
Callahan saw the same with Kia in West Point, where its automotive manufacturing plant is expanding to add a line for electric vehicles. Most of the housing for those workers is not available in West Point, a western Georgia city with a population of about 3,500.
“It doesn’t pressurize just the community it’s next to, it pressurizes about a 45-minute radius around the site,” Callahan said. “We live in a country where people are willing to get in a car and travel about 45 minutes to work.”
Other forces are squeezing the rental market. Hedge funds are picking up properties that might have a reasonable mortgage of around $850 per month, and renting them back at $1,600 a month. “That is a dramatic change,”said Callahan.
Community Leaders Plan for Better Housing
State leadership in Georgia has aggressively pursued this economic growth, promoting the state as pro-business and as having land available for large-scale projects for at least a decade. Gov. Brian Kemp has long talked up the state’s resources and workforce, available for the likes of the 1.5 million-square-foot Anovion Technologies facility, which will make battery components in southeastern Georgia. In 2023, the state had acknowledged the gap between the jobs created by this type of development and housing shortages and it began to invest in expanding in new homes as well.
In 2023, the General Assembly began funneling state money to the Rural Workforce Housing Initiative to provide 0-3% interest construction loans. The program has since awarded $46 million to housing and infrastructure loans, including single-family homes and multi-family senior apartments, as well as projects to improve water and sewer capacity to make way for new housing developments.
“These grants are the first step in meeting the needs of communities experiencing incredible growth as we continue to see new opportunities come to all corners of the state,” Governor Brian Kemp said in the press release announcing the first round of grants.
That funding overlaps with some of the new clean energy projects. Dalton-Whitfield County Joint Development Authority received $1.5 million for street and stormwater drainage construction for 39 new homes. The Stephens County Development Authority received $478,400 to build a sanitary sewer lift station to allow constructing 318 housing units near an expanding regional industrial park; SungEl has announced plans to begin manufacturing batteries in the City of Toccoa, which is also contributing to the project.
Whether the grant fund can scale to the size of the need remains to be seen.
“It’s part of the solution. It will help us in areas that need infrastructure. It will help us in the most rural areas,” said Callahan. “It’ll help the most challenged among us.”
Sarah Melotte and Elizabeth Miller wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.
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