WASHINGTON - The Energy Department warned yesterday that Sen. Sherrod Brown's demand to temporarily suspend the use of federal stimulus dollars for clean-energy projects would "cause immediate layoffs" of workers across the country.
In a sharp exchange between the Obama administration and Senate Democrats, Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, said that "other countries are not pressing the pause button on clean-energy industries, and they will move quickly to capture America's share of the global market while we sit on the sidelines."
The agency reacted just hours after Brown and three other Democratic senators introduced a bill that would prevent money from last year's $787 billion economic stimulus package from being used by foreign companies to build wind turbines and other clean-energy components outside the U.S.
Brown and the other senators - Charles E. Schumer of New York, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Jon Tester of Montana - also asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to "place a moratorium on distribution" of clean-energy grants from the stimulus package "until our legislation becomes law."
In particular, they objected to a $1.5 billion wind farm planned for western Texas that the senators said would use 240 wind turbines manufactured in China and create 3,000 jobs abroad. Backers of the project, which include two U.S. companies and one Chinese company, have said they would seek $450 million in federal stimulus money to complete the project, which would supply clean electricity to 180,000 customers.
"We cannot sit idly by while China races to the forefront of clean-energy production at the expense of U.S. manufacturing, U.S. jobs and U.S. energy independence," Brown said. "And we certainly can't shoot ourselves in the foot by helping to finance Chinese clean-energy production. Taxpayers expect the government to use their dollars to support American jobs."
But the four Democrats quickly came under fire from not only the Obama administration, but also advocates of wind energy and organizers of the Texas wind farm.
Cappy McGarr, managing partner of U.S. Renewable Energy Group, one of the two American companies involved in the Texas wind farm, said in a statement that "the vast majority" of the jobs created by the wind farm "will be located in the United States and done by American workers."
McGarr insisted that "a minimum of 70 percent of each wind turbine" in the project, "including the massive towers and blades, will be wholly manufactured in the United States and made entirely of American steel."
The American Wind Energy Association asserted that suspending the program "would cost 50,000 American workers their jobs" and "torpedo one of the most successful job-creation efforts" of the stimulus package.
Meghan Dubyak, a Brown spokeswoman, said the
Ohio senator "does not support ending this program.
He just wants it fixed as soon as possible so jobs are created in America rather than China."
She added: "The point of this bill is to improve the program so that we create more jobs with U.S. taxpayers' funds, and the letter is aimed at raising this matter with the administration."
The four senators cited a report last month by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a project of the American University School of Communications, that 73 percent of the $1.9 billion in wind-energy grants since September have gone to foreign-owned companies.
But administration officials circulated their own analysis that asserted, "it is mistaken to conclude that, because many of the projects have foreign parent companies, the funds are going abroad or the jobs are created abroad. They are not."
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Thursday, March 4, 2010 2:53 AM
By Jack Torry
jtorry@dispatch.com
