Colorado Leans Heavily on Smart Energy

Saturday, 12 June 2010 10:32

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Outgoing Colorado governor Bill Ritter has spent his last four years in office promoting renewable energy as both a philosophy and as an economic strategy. Ritter, who had decided not to run for re-election, has signed nearly 60 pieces of clean-energy legislation since taking office in 2007. Some of the laws include offering incentives and loans to homeowners to adopt solar, increasing the percentage of power utilities must from renewables by 2020 from 20 percent to 30 percent and facilitating renewable energy financing by folding it into a home mortgage.

Ritter announced during a speech this week that his administration was “creating jobs, attracting companies, reducing energy consumption and advancing high-tech projects that will continue to bear fruit for decades to come.”

“The New Energy Economy” was Ritter’s campaign slogan during his 2008 campaign and his mantra while pushing for his state economic recovery plan. Proponents of his efforts claim up to 90,000 new jobs have been created; opponents say it’s more like 20,000. What can be verified is that Colorado has embraced a global outlook.  The state added 2,500 jobs from Vestas Wind Systems. The Denmark-based company chose to make Colorado its North American manufacturing center. SMA Solar has also opted to open a manufacturing plant in Colorado this summer, the company’s first outside of Germany, which will add 700 jobs.

Not everyone supports the investment in green jobs. Republican Representative said the green jobs have required too much of a training investment, using money that could have been used to retrain workers in other fields. “It was green this and green that, everything green got an exclusion at the expense of everything else,” Stephens complained.

A study released earlier this year from Environment Colorado estimated the law increasing the renewable energy standard to 30 percent would create 23,450 jobs in solar generation over the next decade, although most would be temporary jobs. Holly Horton, VP of SunRun, a company that finances solar projects, argues that businesses in local communities benefit when new companies buy new products and points out the oil industry has been subsidized for decades and renewable energy needs the same kind of help if it’s going to reach its full potential. “This is a nascent industry,” she said.