Commitment to renewable energy blows hot and cold

They're putting up another wind farm near Walla Walla, in Washington state. The towers are coming from Korea, Vietnam and Canada. The turbines, blades and other parts were made in Denmark.

What are Americans doing? They're taking the stuff other people make off of boats and trucking them to the wind farm. Americans might have been manufacturing these windmills, were their national leaders not so wrapped up in the needs of oilmen.

These are gold-rush days for renewable-energy manufacturing, but Washington, D.C., has done little to keep it on American soil. Our lawmakers are blind to the possibilities. Worse, when it comes to policy, they're kings of chaos.

Vestas Wind Technology, the giant Danish maker of wind turbines, considered building a plant in southwestern Washington, or across the border in Portland, Ore. But Congress failed to extend a tax credit for wind-generated power, and Vestas dropped the idea. Its plant would have made the region a center for renewable energy. It could have created 1,000 good-paying jobs. Would have, could have.

The tax credit has already expired three times. The recent energy bill revived it, but for a lousy two years. Without consistent policy, manufacturers won't risk pouring millions into new U.S. plants. General Electric is an American company that has become a major player in wind-power technology, but it does much of this manufacturing in Germany.

"Would you want to sell into a market that is a $3-billion market one year and a half-billion market the next year?" asks Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association.

Europe and Japan offer generous tax subsidies for renewable energy. This has created enormous markets within their borders and factories eager to supply them.

United Solar Ovonic, near Detroit, makes flexible solar panels. It has a six-month backlog for orders and has just broken ground for a second plant. But most of the company's sales are overseas, with 45 percent going to Germany alone.

Uni-Solar's panels use photovoltaic technology, which converts sunlight into electricity. The global market for such devices is growing about 40 percent a year.

"Worldwide, the biggest user of photovoltaics is Germany, then Japan," says Subhendu Guha, Uni-Solar president. "We are way below."

The reason is that these other countries offer bigger subsidies. America's 30 percent federal tax credit for installing solar equipment is nice, but nowhere near the support available elsewhere.

Prices for solar products have jumped in countries with high demand for them. That has created a shortage in this country. At the recent Southwest Sustainability Expo in Flagstaff, Ariz., American buyers complained that solar panels were hard to find because U.S. makers preferred exporting their products.

The result is that some American consumers can't move off of oil, even when they want to. Imagine the solar-energy industry we could have here in the United States, if Washington got its act together.

The capacity to generate wind power in the United States has been increasing an average 25 percent a year since 2000 — despite the on-again, off-again nature of the tax credit. But the graph of growth looks like a roller coaster.

"Each time the credit expired, hundreds of jobs were lost," Swisher says. "All of those jobs are going to Denmark, Germany and other places where they have more consistent and stable policies. Policy drives investment."

I order my conservative friends, now wagging their fingers at the idea of subsidies for renewable energy, to take another look at the recent energy bill. Of the $14.5 billion in tax breaks to energy producers, about $9 billion goes for oil, gas and coal — and at a time of soaring oil profits.

A mere $3 billion was set aside for incentives to produce electricity from renewable sources. Members of Congress who did fight for the renewable-energy tax credit told the industry that, given Washington's mania over fossil fuels, it was lucky to get what little it did.

The point is that renewable energy is not some environmental fad. There's gold in those windmills. If the threats of surging oil prices and global warming don't get through the thick skulls in Congress, perhaps the prospect of Americans making serious money through these emerging technologies will.