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Yachtie -> Wind (9/20/2012 12:17:44 PM)
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FAIRLESS HILLS, Pa. — Last month, Gamesa, a major maker of components for wind turbines, completed the first significant order of its latest invention: a camper-size box that can capture the energy of slow winds, potentially opening up new parts of the country to wind power.
Green
But by the time the last of the devices, worth more than $1.25 million, was hitched to a rail car, Gamesa had all but shut down its factory here and furloughed 92 of the workers who made them.
“Big Wind has had extension after extension after extension,” said Benjamin Cole, a spokesman for the American Energy Alliance, a group partly financed by oil interests that has been lobbying against the credit in Washington. “The government shouldn’t be continuing to prop up industries that never seem to be able to get off their training wheels.”
But without the tax credit in place, the wind business “falls off a cliff,” said Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies the market potential of renewable electricity sources.
Wind industry jobs range in pay from about $30,000 a year for assemblers to almost $100,000 a year for engineers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Aside from Clipper Windpower and General Electric, most of the turbine manufacturers operating in the United States are headquartered overseas, especially in Europe, where wind power took off first, spurred by clean energy policies and generous subsidies.
As the United States put in place mandates and subsidies of its own, several large outfits, including the Spanish company Gamesa, set up shop stateside. Because the turbines, made of roughly 8,000 parts, are so large and heavy — blades half the length of a football field, towers rising hundreds of feet in the air, motors weighing in the tons — they are difficult and expensive to transport.
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