The new Climate Bill is on deck in the House of Representatives — and, with President Obama pushing to double alternative electricity sourcing in the next three years, players are lining up to keep within the bill standards requiring that 25% of electric
An industry group, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), has
launched an effort this week to support such a standard and to urge
lawmakers to create an energy-production tax credit. The group says
such moves would go a long way toward putting people who have lost
their automotive jobs back to work.
The organization, which says wind power grew 50% in 2008 — an amount
roughly the size of Nebraska’s installed capacity, or two million homes
— argues that wind farm projects could create hundreds of thousands of
American jobs, and billions in revenue. Per AWEA, the wind industry
last year created 35,000 new jobs and generated $17 billion in economic
investment.
To back the argument, AWEA has launched a series of documentary-type
Web videos, and TV and print ads in its push to raise awareness about
wind energy with a pragmatic pitch that suggests auto’s loss is wind’s
gain.
Ads in The Washington Post
and on NBC’s “Meet the Press” show American workers — many that it
says were former employees of the U.S. automotive industry — working
at Cardinal Fastener, a Bedford Heights, Ohio-based firm that makes
bolts for wind turbines and other industrial products. The association
says 55 such facilities were built last year to support the growth in
wind energy technology.
The commercial shows people on the factory floor doing iron work to
fashion bolts and fittings, cut with footage of gigantic turbines being
lifted into place on cranes and spinning in the wind on mountain
ridges. The effort urges people to go to wwwPowerofWind.com and urge
Congress to pass renewable electricity standards.
The webisodes comprise interviews in the Cardinal plant with workers
who lost jobs in the auto sector. One has an operator — a thread
roller — talking about how he lost his job at an auto supplier. “When
I started there, we had 120 employees,” he says. “When I was finally
let go, they were down to twenty. For a person of my age, it was
devastating knowing that there was a possibility there wasn’t going to
be another job.”
In the video, Cardinal’s president John Grabner likens the wind
industry’s potential growth to that of the auto business in better
times. “This is an industry starting with nothing and growing to big,
big numbers,” he says. Another employee ties it to the environment and
less reliance on foreign oil. “I love to go fishing, so I like clean
water for my fish.”