Green Tech

A day after the federal government awarded $500 million to renewable-energy projects, the American Wind Energy Association is pointing to a study that concludes that the investments will lead to "green collar jobs" as intended.

The U.S. Treasury and Energy departments on Tuesday said that 12 renewable-energy projects, 10 of them in wind, were awarded cash grants, a move meant to bring financiers back to the U.S. wind industry and create manufacturing and construction jobs.

Home on the plain: Wind power.

(Credit: GE)

On Wednesday, the AWEA said that a new study shows that the government stimulus on wind is money well-spent when it comes to job creation. Specifically, the industry association backed an analysis from the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory that debunks a previous study which found that Spain's wind and solar policies actually resulted in fewer jobs.

That previous study dates back to March when researchers at Spain's King Juan Carlos University concluded that for every job created by Spain's aggressive renewable-energy policy, on average 2.2 jobs will be "destroyed." The study (click for PDF in English) has been cited by people opposed to using Spain as a model for U.S. energy policy.

The reasoning behind the analysis is that nonsubsidized investments would have created jobs at a lower cost. It calculates that a "green job" in Spain costs over twice the "average capital per worker" in the private sector.

The analysis of Spanish job creation doesn't quite add up, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's response which was published in August. (Click for PDF.) NREL found fault with how the King Juan Carlos University study calculated job loss, saying that more established methods found a net benefit to Europe's energy policies.

In addition, NREL researchers said that the Spanish study doesn't take into the account the value of creating industries with export potential. Many industrial areas of the U.S. with auto expertise, for example, are trying to move into wind turbine manufacturing. It also said that there are limits to applying the lessons of Spain's employment market to other countries.

But even in its rebuttal, NREL researchers concede that it's a fair to ask whether the net effect of boosting wind and solar power is more jobs. In the U.S., the Senate is considering whether to create a national mandate for renewable-energy production at utilities or to ratchet up the one passed by the House earlier this year.

Overall, NREL found that the price of conventional energy is the key point in determining whether government policies supporting renewable energy have a net positive effect on creating jobs. "With increased awareness of potential energy price scenarios, recent research has found that it is only when conventional energy prices are forecast to be very low that net employment impacts from (renewable energy) investments are negative," according to the study.

WALTHAM, Mass.--Green-jobs advocate Van Jones has gone from being a community organizer in Oakland, Calif., to a community organizer in the White House.

Jones last month was named special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation in the White House, where he is tasked with coordinating green job-related initiatives among different government agencies. On Thursday at the Bentley University Leadership Forum, he gave a speech on the economic implications of clean-energy policies.

Jones, founder of the Green for All organization and author of the "Green Collar Economy," is best known for advocating job creation for low-income people in clean-energy businesses, such as weatherizing homes or installing solar panels.

His message to Bentley students was that, after many years of little change, business people are ready to let a "riptide of innovation" flow through the energy industry--if a new set of rules are put in place.

"The energy sector today will be as unrecognizable 10 years from now as the information technology sector is from where it was 10 years ago if we let Barack Obama do his job," Jones said.

Green-jobs advocate and White House adviser Van Jones at Bentley University.

(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET)

The stimulus package passed earlier this year includes billions of dollars to promote business in renewable energy and efficiency. The law provides loans for wind and solar farm developers, $11 billion to upgrade the electricity grid, $5 billion to weatherize building to be more energy efficient, $1.6 billion in energy research and development, and a half billion dollars in job training.

The most promising businesses in the near term are in energy efficiency and renewable energy--solar, wind, geothermal, wave and tidal power, and "smart biofuels," Jones said.

Further out, the industries that hold the most promise are those at the intersection of "IT and ET," or information technology and energy technology. That means smart-grid technologies to make the flow of power across the grid more efficient and energy storage.

"Five to 10 years from now, the people making the most money are the people who figure how to store those clean electrons and move them around the country," he said.

The employment potential from clean-energy technology innovation crosses spans from "GEDs to Ph.D.s," he argued, as there's both a need to service wind turbines and invent new battery technologies.

Political showdown
But despite his upbeat take on how green-technology industries can create jobs, Jones recognizes that changing the energy industry is a massive undertaking for both economic and political reasons.

Innovation in the energy sector has been held back by incumbent companies with powerful lobbyists in Washington, he said. He joked that the U.S. is on the "post whale-oil strategy" because petroleum oil came into wide use after whale populations declined.

"Somewhere out there somebody in her mind or her garage has a Google, or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or YouTube for energy. She will never get that product to market and if she does, she will never get to scale," he said. "Because the rules have been written to protect the pro-polluter status quo at the expense of the innovators and the entrepreneurs and the Earth itself."

Next week, hearings in the House will begin on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. That bill calls for a system to regulate greenhouse gases, a contentious issue in energy and climate policy.

The Obama administration favors a cap-and-trade system where heavy polluters need to buy permits for carbon emissions. The government sets a cap on the total emissions level, which would decline over time, and polluters can buy and sell those permits to meet those targets.

Detractors of carbon regulations say that imposing a cost on polluters for carbon emissions will be passed onto consumers and hurt businesses.

Echoing comments earlier this week from Carol Browner, Obama's assistant on energy and climate change, Jones said that American businesses have been able to meet previous environmental mandates, including the Clean Air Act, through competition.

Industry overestimated by six times the costs of meeting regulations to reduce air pollutants that cause acid rain, Jones said. There will be a lot of "economic fear-mongering" about carbon regulations as well, he predicted.

In the case of meeting carbon emissions limits, Jones said many businesses, such as heavy manufacturers and utilities, will be motivated to invest in technologies that make them operate more efficiently, which typically have a relatively fast payback.

Although Jones cast the political discussion on energy as a choice between "dirty and clean," in response to a question, he took what could be called a conservationist's view toward fossil fuels.

"We don't know really how valuable that stuff will be in 100 years from now, 200 years from now," he said. "The carbon resources that we have...took a couple millions of years to create. It makes good sense to be good stewards of it."

Environmental activist and author Van Jones, one of the first to recognize the power of a "green collar" job corps as a tool for social justice, has been tapped by the Obama administration to serve as special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

Under his new post, which he'll start Monday, Jones will shape and advance the administration's energy and climate initiatives "with a specific interest in improvements and opportunities for vulnerable communities," said Nancy Sutley, chair of the CEQ, in a statement Tuesday.

Van Jones, founder of Green For All, on Monday will start a new post as special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

(Credit: Green For All)

The Yale-trained attorney from Tennessee made a name for himself in the San Francisco Bay Area through his work on youth-violence prevention and police- and youth-justice reform with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which he co-founded 11 years ago in Oakland, Calif.

More recently, however, he's been catapulted to the national stage by his push to get national funding for green jobs training. He also launched Green For All, an organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. And his recent book, "The Green Collar Economy," made The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcover books.

His hope is that low-income, minority communities will be able to share in the potential fortunes of the emerging clean-tech economy.

"We need to be very sure we are not replicating the mistakes from the dot-com days when we set ourselves up for a digital divide," he told CNET News in a 2007 interview. "We should work very hard to avoid having an ecodivide where we have ecological haves and ecological have-nots."

"There's an opportunity here to take a photovoltaic panel and use that not only to push down the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but also begin to push people up out of poverty," he continued in the interview. "I think it would be very smart for Silicon Valley to think about these technologies as social uplift, job-creating technologies as well as global warming solutions."

Taking the reins at Green For All will be Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, the former executive officer at the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council.

Former CNET News staff writer Elsa Wenzel contributed to this report

Green-tech jobs are providing a bloom to Silicon Valley's otherwise barren employment outlook, according to a recently released economic report.

In the high-tech mecca, Silicon Valley jobs dipped 1.3 percent year over year in December. Per capita income fell 0.8 percent last year over the previous period--the first time it had fallen since 2003, according to a report by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network. The two organizations will jointly host the State of the Valley Conference on Friday in San Jose, Calif.

Such results in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area come at a time when jobs contracted 1.7 percent statewide and 2 percent nationwide during the same period, according to the report.

(Credit: Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network and Silicon Valley Community Foundation)

According to the report:

Until the last quarter of 2008, Silicon Valley seemed to be weathering the global financial crisis and economic recession better than the nation. This is no longer the case. Since November, we have witnessed a spike in job losses and a significant drop in the commercial property markets.

But green-tech jobs have grown 23 percent from 2005 to 2007, according to the report, as venture capital investments in the sector have soared since 2005. Last year alone, venture capital investments in Valley clean-tech companies soared 94 percent over the previous year, the report noted.

(Credit: Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network and Silicon Valley Community Foundation)

And within green tech, jobs involving energy generation, which primarily entails solar system installation, accounted for the largest slice. But in the two-year period spanning 2005 and 2007, jobs involving green buildings climbed 424 percent, transportation rose 140 percent, and advanced materials 54 percent, according to the report.

(Credit: Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network and Silicon Valley Community Foundation)

The report further notes that growth in green-tech jobs may eventually pull the region out of the economic malaise, which has taken out a wide swath of jobs both within Silicon Valley and across the nation:

Today we're racked by the collapse of our nation's financial institutions, a meltdown in the housing markets and a global climate crisis, and yet here too we may already be seeing the seeds of a Valley comeback. It is being driven by our newly emerging "green" economy.

The report further calls on a retraining of the region's workforce to take advantage of this shift and others within the region's high-tech industries.

Over the past decade, for example, Silicon Valley has seen a change in its industry mix from predominately hardware companies to software companies, the report notes.

WASHINGTON--As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama famously courted both labor unions and Silicon Valley firms. Now President Obama is finding that two groups that have been some of his most enthusiastic supporters are at loggerheads.

The tech sector sees President Obama's call for billions of dollars in targeted tax cuts and deficit spending on a new green economy as a generous windfall. So does the labor movement, which spent at least $385 million electing Democratic candidates, and is at odds with business over investment and procurement policies in the so-called "stimulus" package, including the "buy American" provision.

At the opening of the Good Jobs Green Jobs national conference here Wednesday, union leaders said high labor standards must be maintained in the government's nearly trillion-dollar attempt at economic recovery--which includes billions of dollars for broadband deployment and tens of billions of dollars for energy initiatives.

"If we extinguish workers' rights, the chances for a green economy are nonexistent," said Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, the largest communications and media union that represents workers from AT&T, Embarq, Comcast, and many other companies. "We're not protectionists--we're people who believe in a sustainable economy. We can't just depend on markets, and if we do, we're likely to come up with answers that are at best incomplete."

On the other hand, many economists agree that higher union salaries can lead to fewer jobs (and higher unemployment). The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics says: "High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy."

More than 2,000 business, labor, and environmental advocates are participating in the conference, which lasts through the week, to shape the national dialogue on creating a "green" economy.

"This is the working-class and the progressive-movement's Davos," said Leo Gerard, the international president of the United Steelworkers.

A "green" economy will create new opportunities for labor, Gerard said, citing Gamesa, a Spanish windmill company with a branch in Pennsylvania.

"Gamesa is 100 percent union, and they make their windmills 100 percent union," he said. "In a windmill, you've got over 200 tons of steel, 20 tons of composite material, 250 cubic yards of cement...Every one of those is a green job, and one wind turbine can create enough energy for 500 to 600 homes."

For such projects to work as an economic stimulus in the United States, though, labor leaders said American jobs must be better protected. They pointed out that the "buy American" provision of the "stimulus" package, which would require manufactured goods used for projects funded by the legislation to be produced in the United States, is in line with long-standing procurement laws already in place.

"The economic philosophy of the right wing has allowed them to ignore that," Gerard said.

Regardless of its consistency with U.S. laws, he said, the controversy surrounding the bill has misdirected the dialogue about the economic package from its main objective: creating good jobs.

"This isn't about a trade war," Gerard said. "It's about making sure we're not putting our jobs out to bid for China."

The technology industry, which will play an integral part in developing smart grids, renewable-energy sources, and other "stimulative" efforts, sees the "buy American provision" very differently.

Dozens of companies and trade associations, including AT&T, Dow Chemical, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, and the Consumer Electronics Association, sent a letter Tuesday to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) saying the provision "will harm American workers and companies across the entire U.S. economy, undermine U.S. global engagement, and result in mirror-image trade restrictions abroad that would put at risk huge amounts of American exports."

"Government procurement is part of the WTO agreement," CCIA president Ed Black has said separately. "U.S. companies have won nondiscriminatory access to supply products for other governments because of these provisions. Keeping that reciprocity is important to the current economy and the economic recovery we are all hoping to see."

He said his organization has additional concerns that the "buy America" provision could be extended to information technology and is particularly concerned that the provision could extend to health IT stimulus efforts.

Gerard said at Wednesday's conference that "there's a fairly high level of duplicity" in the discussion over the "buy American" provision.

"I didn't hear any of the high-tech firms yelling and screaming when China said they were investing $700 billion for Chinese jobs," he said, "when they refused to sign the WTO procurement policy. All of a sudden, because we want to do this in the United States, something's wrong."

"I resent the high-tech community, (which has) resisted all kinds of training programs so they can export cheap labor," he added.

Wednesday's conference preceded a rally on Capitol Hill at which union activists voiced their support for the Employee Free Choice Act, a controversial measure that would allow workers to unionize by signing a card rather than through secret ballot. Some members of the tech industry are opposed to this measure as well.

"Future job growth is likely to come from the technology industry, and innovation requires the flexibility for companies to hire and fire," CEA President Gary Shapiro told CNET News in November. "In the tech industry, unionization would be devastating, frankly."

"When it comes to workers, we can't just be another commodity thrown in a landfill," Cohen said when speaking about the Employee Free Choice Act. "We want good jobs, we want green jobs, we want union jobs, and we're going to take a stand."

CNET News' Declan McCullagh contributed to this report.

Unemployment would plummet along with the reliance on and cost of foreign oil, if the U.S. government invested $100 billion to create 2 million green jobs, according to a report from progressive groups.

The report, released Tuesday and backed by the Center for American Progress, projected that it would take two years to cultivate 2 million new jobs in six areas related to clean technologies.

Positions paying at least $16 per hour would include installing solar panels and wind turbines, expanding mass transit, renovating buildings, developing smart electrical grids, and brewing better biofuels.

The authors compared the cost as nearly equal to that of the government's April economic stimulus package, but with better long-term results, such as shrinking the unemployment rate from 5.7 percent to 4.4 percent.

Their suggested $100 billion would comprise $50 billion in tax credits to businesses and homeowners; $46 billion in direct government spending on public buildings, transportation, and energy projects; and $4 billion in federal loan guarantees to finance building retrofits and renewable energy investments.

Although that would create a short-term fiscal deficit, long-term funding could come from the proceeds of a carbon cap-and-trade system, according to the report.

The "Green Recovery" report (PDF) comes from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which projected in June the potential rise of 14 million green-collar jobs in the United States.

The report envisions upgrading blue-collar jobs to achieve green goals.

(Credit: Center for American Progress/Political Economy Research Institute)

A related coalition of progressive nonprofit groups aims to amplify its call for green jobs following the first presidential debate on September 26. Partners include the United Steelworkers union, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council. And Green for All, led by Van Jones, has been pushing for "green-collar" jobs to replace lost blue-collar positions and to help revitalize blighted communities.

Retooling the economy to reduce the need for foreign oil has been a central theme in the platforms of both presidential candidates. Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama proposes spending $150 billion to add 5 million green jobs. Republican nominee Sen. John McCain, though less specific, says his energy and economic policies would expand the workforce by millions of positions.

A 'green' economy could provide new, improved opportunities for 14 million workers, according to a report released Tuesday by progressive environmental and labor groups.

For now, a quick look at any employment ad Web site turns up few opportunities in hands-on, "green" trades, such as installing solar panels. However, the 2007 U.S. Energy Act approved $125 million in funding for workforce training through the Green Jobs Act.

What might the new jobs look like?

Revamped professions, from agricultural inspecting to welding, would cover 9 percent of the U.S. workforce, according to authors Robert Pollin and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, economics professors at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

They determined six major areas of job growth: retrofitting buildings, mass transit, efficient cars, wind power, solar power, and cellulosic biomass fuels.

And a green economy would enlist skills honed by blue-collar professionals. For instance, sheet metal workers could apply their skills to building wind power farms. Factory machine operators could help to build greener cars and blend biofuels. Carpenters and roofers could install solar panels. Rail track layers could build the infrastructure for high-speed trains.

Researchers examined average wages of potentially affected occupations in 12 states, as well as national employment data.

They concluded that demand for sheet metal workers, electrical engineers, and welders to design and install solar and wind systems; as well as for truck drivers to move materials from coast to coast, could lead to higher wages and better job security.

The study reviewed opportunities in Florida, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The report was released in partnership with groups including the Sierra Club, United Steelworkers, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

A March study by the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison came up with some similar results, as did a 2007 study by McKinsey and Company.

The latest report didn't make projections for job growth in particular areas, or address potentially negative outcomes. A joint study with the Center for American Progress set for this summer will forecast the growth of various green professions.

Environmental activists, labor advocates, clean-tech CEOs, and politicians around the world continue to amplify their call to rescue the suffering blue-collar sector and reduce carbon emissions with hands-on jobs in renewable energy and other growing, green areas.