DEFINING MOMENT

Can Evergreen Solar Be Our Sputnik Moment?
Clint Wilder, February 1, 2011 (Clean Edge)

"…This year’s defining event…came from the private sector. But it has clear policy and political implications, speaks volumes about current trends in the industry, and poses deep questions for the future of the U.S. clean-energy economy. It was the January 12 announcement of Evergreen Solar’s plan to shutter its Massachusetts solar PV plant and move production to China, costing the jobs of more than 800 U.S. employees.

"The outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing jobs to China is obviously nothing new, but Evergreen’s move, coming from a U.S. solar industry pioneer that received generous state government incentives, has been widely viewed as a significant U.S. policy failure. And it speaks to a much larger issue: the lack of a long-term, comprehensive U.S. plan for energy supply, job creation, and global economic competitiveness…"

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"…[John Hofmeister, former Shell Oil president and author of Why We Hate the Oil Companies, has proposed] a permanent federal Energy Resources Board, modeled on the Federal Reserve, that would include public officials and corporate representatives of both energy providers and big energy users like banks, airlines, and FedEx/UPS (and I would nominate Google)…[It] would set parameters of energy supply and policy for periods of one to 10, 10 to 25, and 25 to 50 years…[T]he Fed, established by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913 after a series of financial panics, helped remove monetary policy from the vagaries of our two- and four-year election cycles…

"Hofmeister also called the roughly $80 billion to date in ARPA-E loan guarantees to clean-energy companies ‘a frittering number.’ Considering that a single Chinese company, Jinko Solar, received a five-year, $7.6 billion line of credit from the state-owned Bank of China in late January, he has a good point…Since China turned its turbo-charged, government-directed economic growth engine to clean tech a few years ago, it has surged to No. 1 in the world in installed wind energy (adding 16 new gigawatts of capacity in 2010, compared to 5 GW of new wind in the U.S.) and to No. 1 in solar PV production…"

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"In his State of the Union address, President Obama said that the competitive challenges being posed by China, India, South Korea, and other nations should be ‘our generation’s Sputnik moment.’ To meet that challenge, he called for an end to oil industry subsidies (I agree) and a target of 80 percent clean electricity for the U.S. by 2035 (a great goal, but tempered by the inclusion of clean coal, nuclear, and natural gas…

"The original Sputnik moment in 1957…led to the creation of NASA, the Apollo program, and the U.S. moon landing in 1969…Today’s threat is an economic one, as Evergreen Solar’s outsourcing of PV production and many other examples have shown. Obama played up both opportunity and threat in his next-day visit to high-efficiency lighting manufacturer…Can the opportunity to be the world’s No. 1 clean-tech economy deliver the same inspiration as a moon landing? In a nation that’s much more politically divided (and different in countless other ways) than it was half a century ago, it’s a tall order. But our economic future, and our nation’s pride, may depend on it."