By Keith Johnson
Opinions about “green jobs” fall into three broad categories. There are the true believers, who see clean energy as the panacea for bulging jobless rolls.
There are the pure skeptics, the Robert Samuelson camp, who ask how a bunch of wind farms could ever be a better job-creation machine than the nation’s oil and gas industries.
Then there are the skeptical believers: Will there ever really be enough green jobs, beyond armies of caulk-gun wielding temps patching up leaky old homes? That is, at a time when manufacturing jobs are steadily shrinking in the U.S., why should clean-energy manufacturing be any different?
There is no shortage of proponents of re-tooling American factories, and not just in the Rust Belt. Take a look at the governors of Oregon, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Naysayers channel Bill Clinton—er, Jack Stanton–and point out that muscle jobs go where muscle jobs are cheap. Most wind-industry jobs, for instance, are in building the turbines, and China is rapidly becoming the world’s wind-turbine workshop.
It doesn’t have to be that way, says Jeannine Sargent, chief executive of Oerlikon Solar, the solar-power part of Switzerland’s Oerlikon conglomerate. Oerlikon Solar makes the machines that mass-produce thin-film solar panels and is targeting the U.S. market.
A veteran of the semiconductor industry, Ms. Sargent sees plenty of parallels between the two industries.
“Thin-film solar is more akin to Intel than to making jelly beans. It’s still technology-rich—unlike polysilicon—and isn’t a commodity yet,” she said in an interview. “A meaningful chunk of manufacturing could be in the U.S.,” she says.
Yes, semiconductor manufacturing also fled—eventually. Thin-film might not even wait that long. “It won’t be the same road map as the 20-25 years [of domestic manufacturing] in semiconductors, because the world has gotten a lot smarter since the 1980s,” she says. But advanced clean-tech technologies, including thin-film solar, should provide quality manufacturing jobs for 10 to 15 years, she says.
How to make that happen? There was plenty of scoffing about Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s 30% manufacturing tax credit included in the stimulus package. But it could be crucial: The Oerlikon folks say that tax credit makes all the difference.
Without it, production in American factories is as costly as in Germany. With the credit, American factories compete on price with India, Oerlikon analysis shows. (No, there’s no way to catch China on costs.)
Which puts Ms. Sargent squarely in the skeptical believer camp: To paraphrase Fox Mulder, she wants to believe—that the government will keep ponying up enough support to make clean-energy manufacturing grow.