Open thread for night owls: Sending wind jobs away

Daily Kos Staff

Monday February 07, 2011 · 9:06 PM PST

2011/02/07 · 21:06

At SolveClimate, Maria Galluci writes:

President Obama's recent visit to a Wisconsin town to trumpet its cleantech success has inadvertently shone a spotlight on the state's new governor and his plans to reverse a law that advocates say is needed for the wind industry to stay afloat.

Manitowoc, about 80 miles north of Milwaukee and on Lake Michigan, is home to two major renewables firms: Orion Energy Systems, which makes high-efficiency lighting and solar products, and Tower Tech Systems, a manufacturer of towers for utility-scale wind turbines. ...

But now — in light of a bill by newly elected Gov. Scott Walker, a Tea Party-backed Republican — wind industry officials say that Obama's stop at Tower Tech was unwittingly ironic.

The Wind Siting Reform bill would mandate turbines go up at least 1,800 feet from property lines, the strongest regulation in the country. The restrictions would prohibit any future wind projects from being built and threaten the same jobs that Obama heralded just weeks ago, the industry says. ...

Jeff Anthony, [the American Wind Energy Association]'s director of business development, said in the alert that no wind project being proposed or under construction could move forward under the bill, resulting in the loss of more than 700 megawatts in Wisconsin's wind energy capacity and $1.8 billion in investment from projects already planned, plus a loss of 2 million job hours in aggregate employment impacts.

He said that many of Wisconsin's 2,000 to 3,000 jobs in the wind energy industry would leave the state "as developers look for other locations outside of Wisconsin without onerous requirements." ...

• • • • •

At Daily Kos on this date in 2007

Yesterday Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, stated that the US would be better off not imposing trade barriers. In other news: water still wet. But there was something of a dry spot in Bernanke's talk, a little cloud of unease scutting across the blue sky of the billions corporations are raking in. An economic mystery that worried the top money guy.

Income inequality has increased in the United States over the last three decades, Bernanke said. Income at the 90th percentile of wage earners -- those close to the top -- rose 34 percent between 1979 and 2006, while the wage at the 10th percentile rose a scant 4 percent in that period, he said.

The percentage of total income for the top 1% doubled over that period, going from 8% to 16%, and making it a larger portion of overall income than in any period this side of the Great Depression. This inequity is becoming so severe, that the folks in charge of the economy are now worried that it's making our economy inflexible and leading to instability. ...

So the chairman of the Federal Reserve is willing to point to income inequity as a rising problem for the economy, and recognizes this as a concern for more than three quarters of Americans. However, he just can't put his finger on the reason for the rising inequality. Since the nation's chief economic detective seems to be baffled by this mystery, let's pull out the magnifying glass, clamp on a deerstalker cap, and see what evidence we can discover.

Comments are closed on this story.