Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Growth in wind power has added few 'green' jobs

Last week we reported the wind power industry had record capacity growth of 39 percent in 2009, but new "green jobs" haven't necessarily accompanied the surge. "Even though a record 10,000 megawatts of new generating capacity came on line, few jobs were created overall and wind power manufacturing employment, in particular, fell -- a setback for President Obama's pledge to create millions of green jobs," Jim Tankersley of the Los Angeles Times reports.

Green jobs have been slow to materialize, especially "skilled, good-paying, blue-collar jobs such as assembling wind turbines, retrofitting homes to use less energy and working on solar panels in the desert," Tankersley writes. During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised to create 5 billion green jobs over a decade, but administration officials admit they are nowhere near that pace with an estimated 52,000 green jobs created or saved by the stimulus. (Read more)

In rural Tunica County, Mississippi, locals are still waiting for the hundreds of green jobs from the billion-dollar electric and hybrid automobile plant promised by GreenTech Automotive Inc. CEO Xiaolin "Charles" Wang during an October groundbreaking ceremony. Wang is trying to shore up funding for the project, Richard Fausett of the Times reports, but Tunica needs help now after a recession-driven decrease in gambling hurt the nine local casinos. "They done had a bunch of things that's been supposed to come in," one local unemployed man told Fausett. "You hear about it, then after several months you don't hear anything again." (Read more)

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