By Catherine Dodge
Jim Bauer, who lost his job at U.S. Steel Corp. eight years ago, is back at the Pennsylvania plant where he spent 25 years as a crane operator. Only this time he’s making wind turbines for Spain’s Gamesa Corp. Tecnologica SA.
“Wind and solar and geothermal aren’t novelties anymore,” said Bauer, who joined Gamesa in 2006. He says he gets benefits and a $40,000 salary that almost equals his U.S. Steel pay.
Bauer is on the front lines of a debate that has intensified since President Barack Obama in February signed an economic stimulus plan that includes about $70 billion for alternative-energy and conservation programs designed in part to spur the growth of so-called green jobs.
Obama, who pledges to spend $150 billion to create 5 million green jobs over the next decade, calls a clean-energy economy “the key to our competitiveness in the 21st century.”
Skeptics such as David Kreutzer, an energy economics analyst at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, say Obama will be hard-pressed to meet his target and that green energy won’t come close to offsetting jobs lost in manufacturing and “old- energy” pursuits like coal mining.
An economy built on so-called green jobs is “an appealing fantasy” divorced from reality, said Kreutzer, whose organization favors a limited role for government. The nation’s unemployment rate “has much deeper roots than can be solved by installing a solar panel,” he said.
Pennsylvania Experience
Obama’s plans, which include capping greenhouse-gas emissions and drawing 25 percent of U.S. electricity from renewable energy by 2025, would mean a “substantial change” in how the U.S. produces and consumes energy, said John Irons, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “We are going to have to wait at least a couple of years to see if this works.”
Obama is betting that Bauer’s experience in Pennsylvania can be replicated nationwide. The 57-year-old from Levittown is among 900 workers benefiting from $15 million in state incentives that helped attract Gamesa.
The company says it has invested more than $200 million to retrofit part of the abandoned steel compound north of Philadelphia and to build a wind-turbine blade factory in western Pennsylvania that now has about 300 workers.
GE, Vestas
“All the major wind companies now see the U.S. and China as target markets,” said Michael Peck, a spokesman for Gamesa’s Pennsylvania-based U.S. operations.
General Electric Co., the biggest U.S. maker of wind turbines, and Vestas Wind Systems A/S, the world’s largest, say they are investing billions in such technology.
Denmark-based Vestas opened its first manufacturing plant in the U.S. last year in Colorado and now employs about 300 people there. The company is building three more factories in the state, bringing the number of manufacturing jobs to 2,500 in 2010, said Roby Roberts, a company spokesman.
“We’re investing $1 billion in the U.S. because we expect the market to grow exponentially,” he said.
Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE is more than doubling its annual investment in clean-energy technology to at least $1.5 billion by 2010 from $700 million in 2005.
“The record-setting growth of renewable energy, particularly wind, has been one of the bright spots of the U.S. economy,” said Daniel Nelson, a GE spokesman.
Job Creation
So far, such optimism hasn’t translated into enough employment to dent the impact of manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S., including 4.6 million this decade. The 350 jobs created by Gamesa at the site near Philadelphia compare with the 8,000 workers U.S. Steel had at the compound in the 1970s.
The American Wind Energy Association says the number of U.S. jobs in the wind industry has jumped 70 percent to 85,000 from 50,000 at the end of 2007. More than 2.1 million people work in the oil, gas and coal industries, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America and the National Mining Association.
TPI Composites Inc., which provides wind-turbine blades to GE, opened a manufacturing plant in Newton, Iowa, helping revive a local economy hurt when laundry-appliance maker Maytag Corp. closed in 2007 and 1,800 jobs were lost. TPI employs 320 people and plans to have 500 by next year.
First Solar Inc., the largest U.S. maker of solar power modules, has hired more than 1,000 U.S. employees since the Phoenix-based company was founded in 1999. First Solar is adding an additional 100 manufacturing and engineering jobs at its Ohio plant, said President Bruce Sohn.
‘A Challenge’
“It’s really been a challenge in the U.S. to develop a meaningful-size market” so the administration’s efforts are needed, Sohn said.
GE says its wind and solar businesses employ more than 2,000 people in the U.S. That doesn’t count all of the company’s clean-energy jobs, such as those resulting from the company’s “Ecomagination” initiative to build and sell green technology, begun in 2005.
That effort includes wind and solar products as well as more-efficient engines for trains and planes, clean-coal technology and nuclear energy processing.
About 20 percent of the company’s U.S. workforce is “tied to” Ecomagination products, said spokeswoman Deirdre Latour. That would be about 30,000 jobs, based on the 152,000 the company reported for the U.S. as of Dec. 31 in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
One problem in gauging how many green jobs the Obama program may create is defining them. The administration says they include making products or providing services that use renewable energy, cut pollution, and conserve energy and natural resources.
No Reliable Count
The government has no reliable count of such positions, largely because “definitions of green jobs are so broad at this point,” according to a staff report released in February by Vice President Joe Biden’s Middle Class Task Force.
Clean-energy proponents and detractors buttress their arguments with studies. Supporters cite a study showing that investing in renewable and efficiently produced energy produces more jobs than spending similar amounts on the oil industry or to stimulate consumer spending though tax rebates.
“It is America’s best path to prosperity,” said Phil Angelides, a former California state treasurer who heads the Apollo Alliance, a coalition based in San Francisco that promotes clean-energy technology.
2 Million Jobs
A $100 billion investment in a green energy recovery program would create almost 2 million jobs over two years, according to the study, by the University of Massachusetts’s Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst.
The same amount would create 1.7 million jobs if spent on tax rebates or 542,000 jobs if invested in oil, according to the study. It was commissioned by the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based policy group headed by John Podesta, who ran Obama’s transition office.
Critics cite an analysis by Boston-based consulting firm CRA International that said a cap-and-trade climate change bill proposed in the Senate last year would have led to a net loss of more than 3 million jobs by 2020.
Because renewable energy is more expensive than traditional sources such as coal, Kreutzer said, “the capital isn’t generating the same amount of energy needed to run the economy, so the economy is run less efficiently.”
