Goading Green Energy – The Obama Incentive
June 1st, 2010
He definitely has good intentions. Hopefully, U.S. President Barack Obama’s road to green energy will lack in peril, but energy insiders aren’t taking any bets.
Obama’s campaign plan, built on five million new jobs in the “green” energy sector, aims to:
o Strategically invest $150 billion to build a clean energy future.
o Save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela.
o Put one million, American-built, plug-in hybrid cars on the road by 2015.
o Ensure that 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.
It’s an ambitious plan, but one that is currently going head-to-head with economic recession and the turbulence in Congress.
The recession is the 500-pound gorilla in the room. Congress has no such excuse. In Congress, the foot-dragging over alternative energies like solar (and the eventual necessity for updating the electricity grid) is a direct reflection of the financially powerful coal and gas industries, whose spokesperson, Thomas Pyle of the Institute for Energy Research, argues that these industries could create jobs without costing the American taxpayer more money.
One would wonder where Pyle gets his figures. The coal and gas industries currently externalize their costs on the very Americans they propose to salvage. This is good corporate policy, but costs the American public in excess of $5 billion a year just in plant subsidies, to say nothing of the billions spent on reclamation of old sites, coal ash spills and carbon dioxide reduction plans.
T. Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil investor, has come out in support of Obama’s plan, which he says will “kickstart” the economy. Obama’s other plans, to make 75 percent of federal buildings and two million American homes energy efficient, would save additional billions of dollars.
Let’s say Obama gets his wish list. What might be some of the effects? One, solar stock prices jumping after Obama’s economic recovery speech on January 8 is only the first manifestation. First Solar (Arizona) stock closed at $162.54, up 7.18, or 4.62 percent; Evolution Solar Corporation (Arizona) ended up 3.16%; and SunPower Corporation (California) was up $0.74 (1.91%) in after-hours trading.
The solar industry is poised to create jobs as soon as stimulus funding is delivered. In economically devastated areas from Detroit to New Orleans, individuals and companies are poised to move down the greener road of a renewable energy future. In New Orleans, plans revolve around the Energy Smart plan, which aims to outfit 300 homes per year with solar electric panels and weatherize another 2,500 homes to meet new energy efficiency standards.
According to New Orleans City Councilwoman Shelley Midura, who leads the utility committee, the plan is ready to launch. Now all the Council needs is the real green, in terms of stimulus dollars.
Midura says activating the plan will not only stimulate demand for green products like solar panels and insulation, but will provide an incentive for alternative energy firms to move to New Orleans, further boosting the economy.
In Michigan, where an aging and ailing auto manufacturing economy is seeking funds from government, two more firms making solar panel materials in Hemlock – 80 miles from Detroit – are planning a $3-billion plant expansion expected to generate hundreds of jobs.
Dow Corning and Hemlock Semiconductor announced they will increase production of polysilicon, a key raw material used in the manufacturing of most solar cells, to generate approximately 7,000 megawatts of electricity annually when fully integrated into solar panels.
There is no guarantee Obama can goad Congress into pushing his green-energy agenda, but there is still hope for the American manufacturing sector, as demonstrated above. Time and time again, this much-maligned and often ignored extension of American business prosperity has pulled a rabbit out of a hat to raise U.S. prosperity head and shoulders above the rest of the world, and there is no reason it can’t do so again.
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Author: Tina Metcalf
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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