Site Presented By
Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Solar power could be a source of new jobs and an answer to global warming. So why has the U.S. fallen behind other nations in developing it?
Oct 25, 2004 | Ten years ago, American companies owned 50 percent of the market for solar photovoltaic panels -- the key technology necessary for solar power. Today, says Thomas Werner, CEO of SunPower, a solar-technology company based in Silicon Valley, the United States has just a 10 percent share.
Yet even as the U.S. has lost its lead in solar, the worldwide demand for it, and other renewable power sources, such as wind, has surged. According to one report, solar and wind power generation capacity has grown by more than 30 percent annually over the past five years. That's the kind of growth market high-tech venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are normally desperate for.
But while demand is growing, and countries such as Japan and Germany are pushing renewable energy technology development to the limit, the U.S. is lagging. For some energy experts, the failure is more than just a missed opportunity for profits -- it's a profound strategic and environmental screw-up. And the responsibility for it belongs right at the very top -- the energy policy formulated and executed by the current presidential administration. The high price of oil, the threat of global warming, the mandate to develop markets that will spur domestic job growth: all these factors call out for leadership that would push the development of new sources of energy, that would encourage the growth of markets that could literally save the world.
The time could not be more ripe for investing in technology that would help reduce fossil fuel dependence. On Friday, the lower house of the Russian Parliament approved the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty committing the participating countries to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide over the next decade. Meeting the Kyoto Protocol's goals will undoubtedly accelerate the demand for energy sources that don't produce greenhouse gases.
President Bush has often been criticized for tailoring energy and foreign policy to benefit his buddies in the oil industry. He's been dinged by environmentalists for ignoring global warming and hyping futuristic hydrogen fuel-cell cars while excusing the sorry fuel economy of the gas-guzzling, CO2-spewing cars we drive now. But it's not just responsibility for protecting the environment that the U.S. is ceding to the rest of the world by pursuing fossil-fuels-or-bust policies.
"How much wind and photovoltaics and energy efficiency will be needed? The answer is: a lot," says Joseph Romm, author of "The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate." During the Clinton administration, Romm was the chief official in the Department of Energy in charge of conservation and alternative fuels. "Clean energy technologies are going to be some of the biggest markets and job-creating technologies this century. That is incredibly obvious."
To experts convinced that American leaders could make a difference, the misplaced priorities of the Bush administration are more than just a matter of mistaken policy. They are a disaster of the highest order.
"We had the largest blackout in U.S. history in August of 2003," says Romm. "And we have no energy bill, and we have a war in the Persian gulf, and we have oil at $55 a barrel, and we have an obvious problem with natural gas supply and price, and we have a looming problem of global warming. That has got to be called a catastrophic failure of political leadership, and it should be an absolute grave embarrassment."
