BLUE GREEN ALLIANCE WANTS STRONGER RES, MORE JOBS

Renewable Electricity Standard Could Create 850,000 Manufacturing Jobs Across the United States; Labor-Environmental Partnership Releases State-by-State Job Numbers;
Urges Congress to Pass Strong RES
June 15, 2009 (Blue Green Alliance)
and
AWEA Welcomes Support Of Blue Green Alliance, On Strong Renewable Electricity Standard
Heather Caulfield and Julie Clendenin, June 15, 2009 (American Wind Energy Association)

SUMMARY
How To Revitalize America’s Middle Class With The Clean Energy Economy, from the Blue Green Alliance, emphatically makes the case for the New Energy economy. It touts the economic potential of turning to domestic, non-spewing and often free-for-the-taking fuels and turning away from imported, polluting and costly fossil fuels.

A coalition of labor and environmentalists, the Blue Green Alliance was launched in 2006 by the United Steelworkers and the Sierra Club. It includes the Communications Workers of America, Natural Resources Defense Council, Laborers’ International Union of North America and Service Employees International Union.

The report’s “fundamental” fact: New Energy provides an average of 4-to-6 times the jobs as equivalent investments in fossil fuels when manufacturing, installation and operations and maintenance jobs are counted.

Drawing on a methodology developed by the Renewable Energy Policy Project (REPP), the Blue Green Alliance report concludes there is an urgent need for a strong national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) requiring regulated utilities to obtain 25% of their power from New Energy sources by 2025. Such a standard would generate 18,500 megawatts per year of new wind, solar, geothermal and biomass production capacity and create 850,000+ full-time-equivalent (FTE) manufacturing jobs at existing U.S. plants and businesses across all 50 states. (Example: The REPP analysis found that every megawatt of new wind capacity creates 4.85 FTE jobs.)

click to enlarge

Studies from the California Energy Commission, Union of Concerned Scientists, University of California, Berkeley, and Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies over the last 7 years reached similar conclusions.

Based on the REPP analysis, the Blue Green report also advocates for U.S. policy that (1) supports new transmission for delivery of New Energy generated in remote areas to load centers in densely populated cities and (2) creates climate change legislation that (a) puts a cap on greenhouse gas (GhG) emissions, (b) prevents “leakage” of emissions-intensive manufacturing to foreign countries that don’t have caps, (c) auctions emissions allowances to generate revenues for public purposes like the building of New Energy and compensation to low-income families for higher power prices and (4) links the benefits of the New Energy economy to communities that need those benefits the most.

There will be negative consequences, according to the report, if the U.S. fails to create supportive policies for New Energy. The jobs that could create broad-based U.S. economic opportunity will migrate to emerging economies and leave the U.S. once again an energy importer.

The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) endorsed the message of the Blue Green Alliance report. The report echoed things AWEA has been advocating both regarding the potential that New Energy represents and the negative consequences of non-supportive policy.

click to enlarge

COMMENTARY
The Blue Green Alliance report is different from run-of-the-mill scholarly research papers. It uses concrete, real-world examples of its “fundamental” fact (the work that can come from a New Energy economy) to make its point, drawing only secondarily on statistics from REPP.

It describes Ed Stoll, an electrical contractor in Wisconsin, who found satisfaction installing wind turbines and rooftop solar systems.

It describes a 230-megawatt wind project in rural Washington state that brought work where there was little.

It describes Troy Galloway, 45, who lost his job at a Pennsylvania steel mill after 15 years but found new work when Spanish wind giant Gamesa built a wind turbine blade manufacturing facility in his town. The Gamesa plant created 300 direct jobs but the report estimates it created 500 other jobs in Galloway’s Pennsylvania town through the economic activity it generated.

click to enlarge

The Blue Green Alliance report describes the Clipper Wind facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that has become a cornerstone in Iowa’s remarkable jump to number 3 in the nation in total wind energy capacity and, with 7.5% of its electricity coming from wind, the national leader in that category.

It describes Missouri’s Bonita Bell, a 39-year-old widowed single mom, who left her unsatisfying convenience store job for work with wind turbine component manufacturer Pauwels Transformers, doubled her annual salary and found a career she says she wants to stay with until she’s 90.

It describes Ivan Marshall, 46, who went to work at Pauwels when his previous manufacturing job was outsourced to Latin America. From despair and joblessness, he’s moved to work he finds challenging and satisfying.

Both the Blue Green Alliance and AWEA approved the idea of a “Green New Deal” creating a transition to an economy based on New Energy, Energy Efficiency and a newly upgraded transmission system. The original New Deal in the 1930s was based in part on federal investments in new hydropower infrastructure and the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) that brought electricity to millions who had never had it before. A “Green New Deal” would expand the use of New Energy and bring opportunity to tens of millions hungry for a new chance at a new way of powering their lives.

click to enlarge

QUOTES
- Leo W. Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers: We must make a commitment to rebuild America with clean and green products built here, to develop new forms of clean, renewable energy and provide incentives to further their deployment.
- Carl Pope, Executive Director, Sierra Club: “Creating good, middle-class jobs and protecting the environment go hand-in-hand. The green economy will set our country, and the planet, back on track.”
- David Foster, Executive Director, Blue Green Alliance: "With steep job losses in manufacturing in the past year…the need for a renewable electricity standard to combat climate change is now matched by the urgent need to reverse the devastating downturn in domestic manufacturing."
- Foster, on the negative consequences of the failure of U.S. New Energy policy: "The past failure of the federal government to adopt long-term regulatory policies like the RES and programs that encourage domestic manufacturing of new renewable energy technologies…has allowed Europe, Japan, China and other countries that do have such policies to capture the lion's share of manufacturing jobs."

click to enlarge

- Denise Bode, CEO, AWEA: “The Blue Green Alliance has demonstrated to our nation’s leaders the critical importance of a strong National Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), with its call for an RES of 25 percent by 2025. A national RES is THE tool for providing green jobs during a time of high unemployment. The RES has the ability to help guarantee that a significant portion of our electricity supply will come from clean, modern energy resources like wind, which made up 42% of all new electric generating capacity added to the grid last year…The Blue Green Alliance report confirms that the deployment of green jobs is an essential cornerstone of the U.S. strategy to promote energy independence, renewable resources, and environmentally stable energy practices. The implementation of a renewable electricity standard will not only provide jobs for today’s workers, but for future generations of Americans.”