Solar Jobs - America's New Economic Engine?

Well, maybe not a new engine, but surely it has the potential to add some significant horsepower. Let me start by espousing a vision that I have had for some time. America is in economic trouble in the grand scheme of things. I was a part of the early 2000 telecom and internet bust that saw hundreds of thousands of technical manufacturing and R&D jobs get sent overseas, primarily to China, India, and Malaysia. High Tech manufacturing has been sort of a safety net for the American middle class. Our public schools have performed relatively poorly for the last 30 or 40 years but luckily, we have had a strong manufacturing base that would scoop up these kids after high school and they could earn a nice middle class income. Not any more. If your kids do not get a good college education, they could be facing some grim employment prospects. We need to do 2 things to turn this around: 1) fix the educational system by introducing competition 2) encourage new growth industries. I want to focus on the 2nd one. Why isn’t America at the forefront of Solar Energy Technology. We had the lead for years, but because of our inaction and the action of others, Japan, Germany and the Netherlands are leading the world in this technology. If it wasn’t for California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, we wouldn’t have a solar industry in this country and we would probably not be able to do anything about it. But there is still some time to get back in the lead. The IC2 institute commissioned by the University of Texas published a recent study that suggested Texas could gain 123,000 jobs by 2020, second only to California at 141,000. I believe a lot of these jobs would end up staying here. A manufacturer can ship a box of semiconductors from China to Austin, but it is going to be much more difficult to ship a 4 foot x 8 foot pane of glass with embedded photovoltaic material. It is the same reason why glass manufacturers are distributed in the regions where their customers are. Now, there are other substrates that will be developed that will be easier to transport but glass has some very big advantages. It has been studied like no other material and it stands up to hail, rain, humidity and other harsh conditions. So where are these jobs and why aren’t we doing anything to compete for them? SunPower is a great example of this. Cypress semiconductor bought SunPower earlier this decade and located their manufacturing plant in Round Rock, Texas. But with little incentive to stay, and with major customers in Asia, they set up shop in the Philippines. The Batangas facility employs approximately 3,5000 while the Laguna plant employs 1000. Sunpower is growing rapidly and they have just announced three new power plants in Spain. There is a ton of job creation going on and in my next post I will tell you about companies like First Solar, SolarWorld, and BP Solar. Silicon Valley seems to understand the trend and has done a great job in creating opportunities. A large part of that has been due to a government and business partnership that makes it easy to do business and creates incentives to protect this fledgling industry. If you look around at Germany, Japan, and Silicon Valley – that seems to be the common thread on why they are so far ahead of everyone else.