I’m in Georgia today to deliver the commencement address at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and I just finished a tour of the University Center of Excellence in Photovoltaics (UCEP).
With longstanding support from the Department of Energy, and under the direction of Dr. Ajeet Rohatgi , this Center at Georgia Tech has become a premier site for silicon photovoltaic (PV) research in the U.S. The company that evolved from this work –- Suniva –- is an American success story.
Sunny Milpitas, California is the newly announced home of SunPower’s first domestic manufacturing operations. Yep, you heard right. More green manufacturing jobs right here in the U.S.A. (In November, Chinese solar powerhouse Suntech announced that its first U.S. manufacturing facility would be located near Phoenix, Arizona).
SunPower’s 75-megawatt production line is expected to employ 100 by the end of the year, and spread the wealth around even more by sourcing equipment and materials from a host of other states throughout the United States. At the Vote Solar Initiative, we like to remind folks that manufacturing is only a fraction of solar’s overall job creation opportunity. In fact, about 75 percent of solar employment is related to system installation, jobs that are inherently local in the first place. Nevertheless, manufacturing is near and dear to most Americans, and this new production facility is tangible proof that the green economy has a real role to play in bringing those jobs back home — with the right policies, that is.
As was the case with Suntech’s Arizona selection, SunPower’s decision to locate manufacturing in California is a testament to the state’s market-building solar policies. And so it is appropriate that stalwart renewable energy supporter, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, joined in making the announcement. During the event, Schwarzenegger highlighted a few initiatives that have been so instrumental to the state’s new energy economy that we think they bear repeating:
On President Obama’s second Earth Day in office, how far have green jobs come toward fixing unemployment and environmental ills? The administration aims for 5 million green jobs to grow in the next 10 years. Should Americans still believe the “hype?” Here’s the latest in green jobs news from around the Web:
The White House early in 2009 announced $500 million for efforts to train green workers, and this January it described job-training grants worth $100 million of that package. But that’s not nearly enough cash for an effort that should be as big as the Space Race, says pundit Jesse Jenkins. And contrary to conventional wisdom, green jobs are already being exported beyond U.S. borders.
For now, “fewer than 200 factories in the United States are devoted to green production, employing no more than 15,000 workers.” Companies can apply for new, federal tax credits to boost U.S. manufacturing, but an economist finds that “fewer than 500 applications have been filed so far for the tax breaks, and if all were approved they would add just 75,000 green manufacturing jobs.”
Yet, 10 percent of employers have added new, green jobs in the past year, according to a CareerBuilder poll of 2,700 hiring managers. Among the green occupations described as earning more than $60,000 on the job Web site are hydrologist, solar energy system designer, waste management engineer and urban planner. (However, CareerBuilder’s GoingGreenJobs site was kaput on Wednesday.)
Check out these interesting video clips discussing the presence of wind turbines and wind power in American towns.
First up is a clip showing local residents in Cohocton, New York, talking about wind power, and the real benefits they’ve seen from the Cohocton Wind Farm.
IBEW Local 569
Micah Mitrosky is an Environmental Organizer with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 569 in San Diego. She is focused on the renewables sector and talked with CleanTechies about unionization plans for the green industry.
CleanTechies: What is the mission of IBEW Local 569?
Micah Mitrosky: Our mission is to make sure that as our economy shifts to a low-carbon, sustainable economy, that we’re creating middle-class jobs with health care benefits, skilled career opportunities. A lot of what you think of as the fossil fuel sector are middle-class, union jobs. We want to make sure that, as we’re bringing in these new greener technologies and new green ways of doing things, that we’re replacing those with better middle-class career opportunities.
CleanTechies: What’s your biggest challenge in doing that?
Four Democratic U.S. senators have asked the Obama administration to stop investment in wind power and other renewable energy projects until the government ensures that the projects primarily use U.S. labor and materials.
The senators, led by U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, introduced legislation requiring that economic stimulus funds only be spent on clean-energy projects that use materials made in the United States and that create a majority of jobs in America.
On Capitol Hill, the ship of state is so bereft of rudder and sail that the crew is jumping overboard. The latest to abandon ship is Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, who minced no words about the dysfunctional Congress he is choosing to leave.
On Capitol Hill, the ship of state is so bereft of rudder and sail that the crew is jumping overboard. The latest to abandon ship is Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, who minced no words about the dysfunctional Congress he is choosing to leave.
Forget for a moment about health care and financial reform. On national energy and environmental issues, which have been stalled in the congressional queue, we have a critical national security threat, a danger to public health and welfare, and national policy that encourages American families to inadvertently fund terrorists.
Those are among the reasons the paralyzing partisanship on Capitol Hill is so serious a dereliction of duty.
We can’t successfully tackle climate change without changes to the corporate regime which has been in place in America since the Reagan presidency. That’s the underlying message of Charles Derber in his latest book, Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy. It’s a message he delivers with directness in a book much more readable than I expected from an academic sociologist.
He accepts the position of scientists like James Hansen and others who point to the ominous dangers of tipping points in climate and conclude that we are already above a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which they consider no more than 350 parts per million. It’s not a happy acceptance. “No sane person would wish it to be the scientific truth,” he writes.
Derber recounts the terrible difficulty he had, after realising with despair the seriousness of climate change, in dealing emotionally with the prospect of mass, collective death — “more difficult than dealing with my own personal death.”
The only good news he discerns is that the scientific truth may be spreading and leading to a tipping point in the world’s social and political awareness.
With this post, CleanTechies is diverging from our usual content with this light-hearted Valentine’s Day tribute to clean energy from the Vote Solar Initiative, which is working to make solar power mainstream.
People love solar. There are plenty of reasons why that’s the case. Solar creates local jobs. It produces reliable electricity when we need it most. It improves energy independence by tapping a homegrown resource. It offers real hope in the fight against global climate change. And ultimately the idea that we could be harnessing electricity from that big, yellow sun of ours just makes people feel good.
Always up for a good sun pun, Vote Solar thought we’d hammer that point home with a tongue-in-cheek Valentine Video campaign.
The National Resources Defense Council Action Fund released a video clip last week designed to echo Obama’s call to move America towards a “clean energy economy” in his State of the Union address.
The video is part of the “This is Your Moment” campaign, which features a host of celebrities, such as Jason Bateman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Felicity Huffman, Justin Long, Edward Norton, and Forest Whitaker, urging Congress to pass the first-ever climate and clean energy bill, currently pending in the Senate.
At a factory in Wuxi, China, workers lift solar panels onto conveyor belts, while others in white lab coats move between machines as they check on a process for etching and engraving silicon wafers to form solar cells.
This scene in itself isn’t remarkable. But there is a new sort of excitement about the work. China’s production of solar panels has grown quickly in the past two years; it is it now the world’s leading exporter. When Matt Lewis, a representative of the California-based nonprofit ClimateWorks, visited the factory in October, he said it reminded him of his native Silicon Valley: The workers, even ordinary line workers, had a sense that they were part of building the future, the hot new industry.
The move is part of the administration’s effort to gain more votes for a climate bill stalled in the Senate that will seek to boost production of clean, low-carbon energy and help the country reduce its dependence on imported fossil fuels.
The climate bill faces further hurdles after the election last month in Massachusetts that gave Republicans a Senate seat long held by Democrats, depriving the president’s party of 60 votes that could overcome procedural hurdles.
President Obama called on Congress to pass climate and energy legislation that would include the construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants, more offshore oil drilling along the U.S. coast, and increased funding for developing renewable energy and improving energy efficiency.
But the president made no mention in his State of the Union speech of controversial legislation to impose a price and a cap on carbon emissions. By backing away from cap-and-trade legislation that already has been passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, Obama signaled his willingness to work with Republicans to pass a scaled-back version of climate and energy legislation this year.
One of the most promising, yet also most frustrating, aspects of dealing with climate change is how the noise (the static) of the debate makes it difficult for the majority of people to understand the power of the “No Regrets” strategy opportunity and promise.
The concept of a “No Regrets” strategy has been around for decades. For example, this 1991 New York Times article on a National Academies of Science report was entitled Economic Scene: The ‘No Regrets’ Greenhouse Fix