Beside a highway, a single industrial building under construction spans several city blocks. Atop its flat roof, dozens of heating and cooling units sit like biscuits, neatly spaced on a sheet pan baking under the sun. The tree-lined site, which crawls with bulldozers and trucks, is visible from Interstate 75 as it cuts through the Appalachian foothills of northwest Georgia.
Once completed, this 786,000-square-foot building in Dalton will be at the heart of the largest solar-cell manufacturing facility in North America, capable of producing enough solar panels annually to power nearly 1.3 million homes. Hanwha QCells, a South Korean company, already builds solar panels inside an adjacent plant that began operating in 2019. Another production facility is under construction in Cartersville, 30 miles south along I-75.
All told, QCells is investing $2.5 billion in Georgia. It’s among a slew of companies that have made Georgia an emerging hub for clean-tech manufacturing, including electric vehicles and the batteries that power them. Meeting part of America’s growing demand for electricity with solar and other renewable energy is essential to reducing emissions of heat-trapping gases.
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Good jobs and reliable infrastructure propel prosperity. People notice when they’re missing but don’t always remember them in the voting booth.
The same highway, I-75, connects Georgia to Detroit, the traditional automaking hub. Along the way, though, truckers must cross the Ohio River on a bridge known for accidents that is a notorious bottleneck for freight worth $1 billion that passes through daily. Built in 1963, the Brent Spence Bridge carries around 160,000 vehicles a day between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky, twice the number it was designed to carry.
Dave Baker joined the Iron Workers union in Cincinnati in 1997. “I was told we were going to build a bridge,” he says. Politicians promised action….
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