A new federal tariff and price floor will reset what solar hardware costs. A presidential proclamation signed Aug. 6 imposes a 15 percent tariff, under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, on imported polysilicon, solar cells, wafers, and modules, and sets minimum import prices designed to keep below-floor product out of the market. The floors run $21 per kilogram of polysilicon, $100 per kilogram of ingots and wafers, $0.22 per watt for cells, and $0.38 per watt for modules, and importers must certify that the first resale will not fall below them. The Commerce Department will administer the duties, which take effect Dec. 4, and companies that commit to building U.S. factories can apply for exemptions. The stated aim is to reshore the clean-energy supply chain and blunt Chinese control of a material central to both solar systems and semiconductors, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the move is meant to “bring the supply chain here.”
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 6; Solar Power World, Aug. 6
WORKFORCE American employers cut jobs in July. Nonfarm payrolls fell by 23,000, the Labor Department said Friday, against forecasts near 100,000. The unemployment rate eased to 4.1 percent, though for the wrong reason. About 264,000 people left the labor force, pushing participation to 61.4 percent, the lowest since February 2021. The revisions did the real damage, cutting May and June payrolls by a combined 103,000, so hiring this spring ran far thinner than the first reports showed. Construction and professional and business services were close to flat on the month. Economists called it a “no hire, no fire” market. The demographic squeeze is showing up in the data rather than a forecast, so a softer demand signal may ease wage pressure at the margin while the shortage of engineers and skilled staff holds.
Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Situation, July; Fortune, Aug. 7
BIZ The construction planning pipeline strengthened in July. The Dodge Momentum Index, a leading measure of nonresidential projects entering planning, rose 6.9 percent to 291.7 and sits 11.7 percent above a year ago, Dodge Construction Network reported Aug. 6. Institutional planning led at 13.1 percent on schools, healthcare, and public buildings, while commercial planning gained 4.1 percent as three data centers of $500 million each entered the queue. The mix tracks a larger shift in power becoming the largest nonresidential construction market for the first time since 2021, with data-center spending up 29.4 percent over the year while manufacturing construction has fallen 22.1 percent.
Sources: Dodge Construction Network, Aug. 6; Engineering Inc., Aug. 5
ENG Xcel Energy broke ground on its largest Minnesota transmission build in a generation. On Aug. 3 the utility started construction on the Minnesota Energy Connection, a 185-mile, 345-kilovolt line that will carry up to 4,000 megawatts of wind and solar from southwest Minnesota to the Sherco Energy Hub in Becker, together with a new substation near Garvin and the 420-megawatt Lyon County Generating Station, a natural-gas peaking plant. The work runs through 2028 and is projected to generate $300 million in property taxes over the plant’s life. It is a multi-year pipeline of transmission and substation work, and one of the clearest local markers of the grid buildout following coal retirements.
Source: Xcel Energy, Aug. 3
BIZ Texas hit pause on data-center grid connections. Governor Greg Abbott on Aug. 3 halted new data-center interconnections in the ERCOT queue and ordered an audit of whether projects bring their own power, how much water they use, and what public incentives they draw. The state is fielding 474,000 megawatts of interconnection requests. BloombergNEF estimates the pause puts 49,800 megawatts of data-center load and as much as $8 billion in leasing revenue at risk of delay through early 2027, close to a fifth of the national pipeline.
Source: Utility Dive, Aug. 6 (BloombergNEF)
POLICY The biggest federal procurement rewrite in decades is reaching contracts now. The FAR Council’s Revolutionary FAR Overhaul, four proposed rules touching 20 parts of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, published in June and took comments through July 23. The Associated General Contractors flagged this week that agencies are already adopting the changes through class deviations rather than waiting for final rules. Several provisions reach firms bidding federal or federally funded work. Bid-protest rules (Part 33) would let agencies share redacted evaluations to steer protests to the agency level, and termination rules (Part 49) compress the settlement-proposal window from one year to 90 days. A consolidated supply-chain framework (Part 40) adds a single prohibited-source list with 72-hour reporting.
Sources: AGC, Aug. 6; National Law Review, Jul. 14; Hogan, Lovells, Cadwalader, Jun. 29; American Bar Association, Feb. 26; Federal Register, June 23
FUNDING A stop-work order froze a funded Great Lakes carp barrier with bipartisan pushback. The Army Corps of Engineers halted construction on the $1.15 billion Brandon Road Interbasin Project near Joliet, Illinois, the barrier system meant to keep invasive carp out of the Great Lakes, citing an unspecified administrative review. A July 24 stop-work order idled contractor J.F. Brennan Company, which holds a $113.9 million contract awarded in April, and the halt has drawn objections from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and a bipartisan group in Congress who note the project was authorized and funded.
Sources: The Waterways Journal, Aug. 7; Engineering News-Record, Aug. 6
ENG MnDOT will rebuild a Rochester overpass a dump truck wrecked. Repairs to the 85th Street Northwest bridge over Highway 52, north of Rochester, start Aug. 20 and run through October. A dump truck traveling with its bed raised struck the span on Nov. 14, 2025, and the driver was later ticketed for excessive vehicle height. In addition to demolition, the work covers beam setting and a new bridge deck. It closes Highway 52 southbound from the evening of Aug. 28 to early Aug. 31.
Source: KROC News, Aug. 6 (MnDOT)
Close out the summer on the field: ACEC Minnesota’s Foundation Softball Tournament brings 16 member-firm teams together on Saturday, September 19 to support the next generation of engineers, and the four-session Emerging Leaders program for early-career staff runs this October and November. Sign up for both before spots fill up!
The (Almost) Daily Brief publishes most weekdays: policy, funding, workforce, and industry news for Minnesota’s engineering firms, in a few minutes of reading.
