This is a guest opinion column
I grew up in Alabama. My brother and his family call Mobile County home. So, when a fight breaks out over land near the Delta, I don’t read it as an abstraction. I know the land, I respect it, and I understand why the community wants to use its land right. I also know what good jobs mean to a rural Alabama county, because my company helped create more than 800 of them.
In Trinity, in Lawrence County, First Solar runs a $1.1 billion factory, one of the largest investments ever made in a rural Alabama county. More than 800 people work there, earning an average all-in salary of $80,000, turning a sheet of glass into a finished solar panel in about four hours. The steel in those panels is smelted, rolled, and fabricated within 25 miles of the plant. There is no Chinese polysilicon in them. The technology was invented in America, and First Solar owns it outright. This is not the imported Chinese solar that conservatives are right to be wary of. This is solar that’s genuinely made in Alabama…