Tariffs Are Dominating Clean Energy Earnings Calls
The clean energy industry is beginning to report to investors and the public on its first brush with Donald Trump’s trade policy. While earnings season has only just begun, already some broad themes are emerging across the sector: Tariffs hurt. Batteries are getting more expensive. And there’s big demand for power, especially natural gas.
Tariffs
Four big clean energy companies that have reported results so far — inverter and battery maker Enphase, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, electric vehicle giant Tesla, and developer and utility NextEra — mentioned tariffs prominently in either their earnings reports or their analyst calls. GE Vernova said that tariffs would result in $300 million to $400 million of additional costs. Enphase said that tariffs would take off two percentage points from its margin in the second quarter and six to eight points of gross margin in the third quarter. Tesla said that “increasing tariffs may cause market volatility and near-term impacts to supply and demand.”
Tesla’s executives — including chief executive Elon Musk — expanded on that market volatility later in a call with investors and analysts, with Musk saying that he was an “advocate of predictable tariff structures, free trade, and lower tariffs.” Musk added that economic uncertainty could continue to weigh on Tesla’s auto sales, which notably declined in the first three months of the year. “When there is economic uncertainty, people generally want to pause on doing a major capital purchase like a car,” he observed.
NextEra chief executive John Ketchum said the company had “dramatically diversified where we source our solar panels” and was not affected by the recent announcement of high tariff rates on solar panels from Southeast Asia. He also specified to analysts that “we source our wind turbines from the U.S., with manufacturing in Florida.” The company estimated that it has “$150 million in tariff exposure through 2028, on over $75 billion in expected capital spend,” Ketchum said.
Enphase chief executive Badri Kothandaraman attempted to tread delicately on the tariff issue. “While the global policy environment remains fluid with tariffs, with interest rates and subsidies constantly evolving, we are moving quickly to realign our supply chain to minimize downside across a range of scenarios,” he said. “While we cannot control the macroeconomic conditions, we can absolutely control our response.” GE Vernova chief financial officer Ken Parks described tariffs as a “continued increase in the cost base,” and said that the combined tariffs on steel plus various imports from Canada, Mexico, China — which is facing import duties of 145% or more, depending on the product — affect about a quarter of its spending.
Batteries
A lot of that tariff impact comes from the battery supply chain, which China dominates. For Tesla, that means its fast growing energy storage business is particularly at risk. While the company has made some efforts to onshore stationary storage battery production, its chief financial officer, Vaibhav Taneja, said that domestic production would ultimately account for only a “fraction” of its battery needs, and even that would “take time.”
Enphase was similarly upfront about the impact on its battery supplies. “We are no exception. We use Chinese sources for the cell packs,” Kothandaraman said. He explained that thanks to the tariffs, making batteries domestically with Chinese cells “therefore turns out for us that whether we make it domestically or whether we make it outside the U.S., our costs are becoming approximately the same. And the cost impact is significant.” In other words, the tariffs make domestic battery production less appealing than it was before. Kothandaraman said that the company is working on establishing a non-Chinese supply chain, which will take six to nine months.
NextEra’s Ketchum said that the company had made “arrangements” to buy batteries made in the U.S. “for a significant portion of our backlog,” and that its contracts for non-Chinese-sourced batteries required the supplier to cover any tariff-related costs. Ketchum did say that the domestic batteries meet local content requirements for tax subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act, however “there are certain components that come in from outside the United States.” Overall, Ketchum said, “our tariff exposure on batteries is expected to be negligible.”
Federal policy
All four companies are heavily exposed to various energy regulatory and subsidy plans that may or may not survive the double-whammy of the congressional Republicans’ budget-making priorities and the Trump administration’s desire to roll back environmental regulations.
Tesla’s revenue from emissions credits that other carmakers buy to comply with California’s fleet emissions standards was $595 million in the first quarter of this year, compared to $409 million of net income — implying that the company would have lost money if not for the credits. This Trump administration has already attempted to take away California’s ability to set emissions standards, as it did the first time around. Then it was not successful, and this time it might not have to be — the Supreme Court on Wednesday indicated that it would be open to a lawsuit from the fossil fuel industry challenging California’s limits.
Kothandaraman said that “the lack of certainty” around the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is currently being hashed out in Congress, “is definitely a factor” in explaining what one analyst described as “a bit of paralysis on the customer side.” He was hopeful that “demand will be unlocked” once there’s “clarity” on IRA tax credits.
Meanwhile, GE Vernova said that offshore wind orders had fallen by 43%, “as a result of ongoing U.S. policy uncertainty and permitting delays.” It also took a $70 million charge related to the cancellation of a deal to supply 18-megawatt turbines in New York.
Electricity demand
Musk bragged that Tesla’s Megapack utility storage system “enables utility companies to output far more total energy than would otherwise be the case,” and that “utility companies are beginning to realize this and are buying in our Megapacks at scale.” While the company deployed almost 40 gigawatt-hours of battery storage in the past 12 months — an impressive amount based on the current level of grid battery storage in the U.S. — Musk predicted that Tesla could end up deploying “terawatts” of storage on an annual basis.
NextEra has a large renewables development business, and Ketchum sees the uptick in demand for electricity as a boon: “When I look at the demand and the outlook in the renewable sector going … we just continue to see strong demand across the board, with hyperscalers being a nice sized part of that.”
GE Vernova competed with NextEra for the most investor-friendly demand growth story — though its is not a particularly climate-friendly one. The company says it has a backlog of 29 gigawatts of natural gas turbine orders, with an additional 21 gigawatts of reservations that will turn into future production. Its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization for its power business jumped from $345 million in the first quarter of last year to $508 million in the first quarter of this year, while its margins grew from 8.6% to 11.5%.
About a third of its reservations for turbines are for data centers, Scott Strazik, the company’s chief executive said. Some more were to provide baseload power. And the rest? “A healthy amount of these are also F-class gas turbines to just strengthen the durability and the resiliency on the grid,” he said.
