There's no doubt the U.S. is losing the clean-energy race. In 2010 our level of investment in clean energy fell behind both China and Germany, with a growth rate that is 11th among the industrial nations. Last year, China gave $30 billion to its largest solar manufacturers, 20 times the amount that the United States gave, according to Jonathan Silver, former executive director of the U.S. Energy Department's loan program. As a result, in 2010 China sold more than half of the world's solar panels, and is now gearing up a similar effort to dominate global wind markets.
We are consistently losing both manufacturing and deployment leadership in clean-energy technologies that were pioneered and developed in the United States. That's simply not worth debating -- the interesting question is what should we do about it?
There are, broadly, four approaches we can take:
Give Up
That's the approach favored by the Koch brothers (who don't want competition for fossil fuels), coal companies, and much of the Republican leadership Congress, including Representative Cliff Stearns, who is leading the witch-hunt into "Who Lost Solyndra?" When he was attacked by President Obama for saying the U.S. should not try to compete in manufacturing solar and wind power, Stearns responded that his position was based on the fact that "these other nations have cheaper labor, no environmental or safety standards, less regulation, and easy access to raw materials...." False. Of the world's ten largest wind manufacturers, five are based in countries with higher wages and less access to raw materials than the U.S.; one is American. The main raw material in a solar cell, polycrystalline silicon, is made in the U.S. and exported to China. None of Stearns's stated "advantages" are a significant part of why China -- and Germany -- are outpacing the U.S.
Invent Only
Represented by the Breakthrough Institute, and Republicans like Alaska's Lisa Murkowski, along with some high tech advocates, this school argues that as long as the U.S. keeps getting more patents and inventing more new technologies, we'll make the big bucks -- who cares where the stuff is made or deployed? The answer is that jobs don't flow from invention alone -- a point made most eloquently 18 months ago by Intel's Andy Grove
They flow from the combination of initial innovation, market creation, manufacturing , deployment, and perfection. It's the total package that drives the jobs -- and the competitive edge. The United States was able to dominate auto engineering in the 20th century not because we invented the basic technologies -- they were mostly European -- but because we built the roads, created the assembly line, and developed a mass market (when Henry Ford realized his workers could become his customers). The key "perfecting" technology contributed by the U.S. -- Kettering's self-starter -- was not invented until 1915, after American dominance in autos was already well-established.
A variant approach is to concede that America needs big markets for renewables, and that jobs and leadership will flow to the country with the largest volume of clean energy, but to argue that manufacturing doesn't really matter. This is the approach taken by some who argue that while the U.S. ought to have a renewable-energy standard, efforts like the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. are foolish, because what matters is how much clean energy we buy, not how much we make. This has been the response of many solar energy development firms to concern over the tactics used by the Chinese to compete in the solar manufacturing arena -- if the Chinese want to sell solar panels cheaply, even at a loss, that builds U.S. markets and helps create jobs installing solar power.
Enforce the Rules
Last week a group of U.S. solar manufacturers filed unfair trade complaints against China, arguing that Chinese companies were receiving massive subsidies that allowed them to dump their solar cells in U.S. markets at economically unrealistic prices. The complaint, joined by Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, paralleled an early U.S. government complaint against similar Chinese subsidies for wind turbines.
So what are the rules? Are the Chinese breaking them? How important is it if they are?
Grossly oversimplifying, under world trade rules, a country can subsidize a particular industry to help it grow. What it cannot do is subsidize exports -- it has to subsidize the entire industry. And companies cannot export products below-cost to gain control of a market.
Initial Chinese solar and wind subsidies were not accompanied by any massive growth in domestic sales of renewables in China. China was manufacturing wind and solar, exporting them, and building coal plants domestically. And most economists believe that by keeping its currency artificially cheap the Chinese also subsidized all of their exports, not just clean energy. So those complaining about artificially cheap Chinese solar and wind exports start off with some pretty potent arguments. And since the cost of manufacturing any new technology comes down dramatically with scale, if the Chinese built up the scale of their wind and solar industries with unfair subsidies, that's a big deal, one that puts U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage now and into the future.
But, having said that, it's only fair to point out that the Chinese recently took two important steps to create huge domestic markets for clean energy. They established a $0.075/kwh feed-in tarrif for wind several years ago, and have tacked on a $0.15/kwh price for solar. That is much more than the U.S. has done to encourage domestic deployment of solar and wind products.
So we ought to make China play by the rules, but they may be starting to do so anyway.
Win the Game -- With Manufacturing
If all we do is go after the Chinese when they cheat, we'll still lose. The way you win a game is by setting out to win it. And if the game pits countries against other countries, Team U.S.A has to play. That's the final perspective on the clean energy race, and its strongest advocates are major corporate leaders like -- unsurprisingly, perhaps -- Andy Grove -- and more surprisingly Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow Chemical. These leaders see our loss of the clean-energy race as emblematic of a broader national failure -- the inability to see that manufacturing, whether for established products like cars or new ones like solar cells -- is essential for economic vitality.
Manufacturing sits in the middle of a supply chain. You must invent wind-turbines before you can manufacture them, and you must have a market downstream before you can sell them. But if national policy makes this crucial middle link of manufacturing uncompetitive, then the whole supply chain will eventually shrink.
We need an American commitment to become first in manufacturing clean-energy technologies. Upstream, that requires that we invest in programs like the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, so that we will have the best new technology. Downstream, it requires that clean energy developers have fair access to utility markets and customers, as well as reliable access to capital to build their turbines and solar farms. But it will also require a national manufacturing innovation policy -- one that enables the U.S. to deploy the new ideas it creates, manufacture the products its markets demand, and do so on a level playing field with the rest of the world.
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Am I blaming you? Yes, what other choice do I have. America, the US one, needs to reassess how it relates to other nations, and then play by another set of rules. America, the US one, should show more respect, my going towards a green military, green oil...etc. You have a long way to go up, but you will go down further first.
Looks like a difference of about 6 years... which is shown to slightly go down over the next 40 years. However, there a many articles available about how badly China is mismanaging its environment.... I do not need to list any - just google China Environment... My guess is that the multiple issues with smog, lead, and polluted water are probably introducing long term health affects into the population that have ramifications that are difficult to predict.
The best and brightest students in the USA have pursued the more financially rewarding non-scientific careers, instead of educations that might have created technically innovative products that people in foreign countries might purchase.
Asia is now the primary source of the most advanced engineering and scientific talent because their public education process starts early and continues to produce a stream of highly qualified young science and engineering graduates that is quite large compared to what is produced by the US undergraduate programs.
American students will generally not endure the hard work, critical thinking, and intense focus that is required for science and engineering degrees, especially since today there is such limited financial rewards and respect for that effort after graduation.
Only if our US manufactured products are technically STEM superior can/could we export those products in return for their foreign payment (gold and US dollars) back to the USA, unless we can somehow produce these products cheaper than the foreigners.
Neither foreigners nor US citizens will pay any extra for the same product produced with US labor if that product is more expensive.
If the USA had technically innovative products that foreigners did not have, then we could get high prices for those products with excessive profits (until the foreigners copy our inventions and/or infringe upon our patents).
If US citizens are not willing to work for lower wages than the foreigner workers employed in foreign countries, then the USA cannot compete for jobs globally based upon lower product costs, and then those jobs are gone forever.
If the USA cannot compete on lower product costs, then maybe the USA could be competitive internationally through other areas such as exporting superior technology, but only if the USA changed the emphasis of our educational system to produce mostly Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) graduates.
Over the past two or three decades, both major political parties of the US congress decided to destroy our manufacturing and the associated creative critical thinking technically (STEM) oriented human database capability with US “FREE TRADE” legislation and treaties.
The US congress has also destroyed the US creative capabilities and the database of creative critical thinking technically oriented people that won WWII and created the economic power that the USA enjoyed for a few decades after WWII, because the technical innovation, product development and design capabilities and the associated jobs went overseas with the manufacturing capability.
This will not be easy, but it must be accomplished immediately before it is too late.
The USA has instead elected to produce large numbers of liberal arts graduates, MBA graduates, history graduates, philosophy graduates, English graduates, foreign language graduates, economics graduates, musicians, artists, social workers, government graduates, political scientist, and/or other similarly educated US citizens that will not contribute anything to correcting the foreign trade deficit.
We need to reverse course of our educational system and re-emphasize science and engineering to create many more medical doctors, engineers, scientists, and educators as the US educational system did prior to the 1970's, instead of non-technical subjects.
The USA scientists, medical doctors, engineers, and educators must also become much better educated, much more intelligent, and otherwise much more superior to any foreign educated engineer and/or scientist in order to design, create, innovate, and produce new technical products that foreigners do not have, so that the foreigners will then buy these new products from the USA, in exchange for the foreign gold and US currency which would then be sent to the USA companies to pay for the US products and services consumed by foreigners.
If you visit the Texas Medical Center (mostly the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston) and witness the percentage of women wearing Burkas you might get a clue or an estimate of the the percentage of foreign medical service income currency that is received at the Texas Medical Center.
I do not believe that any of these women wearing Burkas are US citizens.
Foreign currency paid to our US located Medical Doctors, Laboratories and Hospitals by foreigners improves our foreign trade balance.
I think that most foreigners still believe that US educated medical doctors are much superior to their own in-country educated medical doctors, and that is probably the reason that they seek the best medical care available which is in the USA.
I believe that we must somehow maintain this US leadership in the medical field.