Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

Mr. PRESIDENT, when BP Solar shuttered its Frederick, Maryland, plant earlier this year, 320 Americans saw their jobs sent offshore to China and India.  Bloomberg said the announcement "signal[ed an] exodus of US renewable-energy jobs."  In fact, BP Solar's move followed GE's closing its Newark, Delaware, solar panel plant; Evergreen Solar's shifting hundreds of jobs from Danvers, Massachusetts, to China; and Gamesa's shutting down a wind turbine factory in western Pennsylvania.

Given broad enthusiasm for creating clean energy jobs, few seem to notice this alarming trend.  But we cannot afford to sit by idly as clean energy jobs steadily and stealthily move overseas.  And so as we debate the Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act, which I support, I rise to call on the Senate also to pass common-sense, bipartisan measures that will enable the US to retain existing clean energy jobs, while capturing millions of new ones that burgeoning global demand will soon create.

To begin, we must dispel the myth that the US cannot be a leader in producing clean technology.  In fact, we once were a leader.  As recently as 1997, we had a "green trade" surplus of $14.4 billion.  But by 2008, that surplus became a deficit of nearly $8.9 billion.  The reversal was triggered largely by a steep falloff in domestic renewable energy technology manufacturing.  For instance, only a decade ago, US solar cell manufacturers controlled 30% of the world market; by 2008, we had only 6%.  Meanwhile, Chinese production has grown from non-existent in 1999 to 32% of the world total in 2008.  Similarly, European manufacturers now account for more than 85% of the global wind component market.  Today, only one of the top 10 manufacturers is an American firm.

What happened?  Simply put, other countries enacted policies to attract investment, both "push" incentives, like tax incentives and direct subsidies to attract manufacturers, and "pull" incentives to create domestic demand.  As a result of these incentives, China displaced the US last year as the world's leading destination for clean energy investment; its total investment was nearly twice that of the United States.  Measured as a share of GDP, domestic clean energy investment places us in the bottom half of the G-20 countries.

If the trend continues, we will fall further behind.  Over the next five years, government investment by China, Japan, and South Korea is expected to outstrip US investment by a three-to-one factor.  This public investment will drive trillions in private sector investment within those countries' borders.

With global clean energy investments expected to reach $2.3 trillion by 2020, we cannot afford to delay measures that will ensure US leadership.  We must look to create jobs across the clean energy value chain – from engineering to installation to sales.  In particular, we must focus on manufacturing jobs.  Because failing to grow a domestic clean-tech manufacturing base will result in trading our imported oil dependency for an imported clean-energy component dependency.  In fact, we are already seeing how shortages in renewable energy components and systems have slowed domestic renewable energy production.  And as we've begun to see, offshoring manufacturing is followed by offshoring of R&D capacity.

To grow our manufacturing base, Congress must take decisive action this year to enact, at a minimum, three common-sense, bipartisan measures.

First, we must send the appropriate market signal by enacting a Renewable Energy Standard, or RES.  Expanding demand for clean energy is essential to raising demand for domestically produced goods.  For instance, every gigawatt of installed wind capacity – that is, roughly enough to power all the homes in Atlanta – is estimated to create up to 4,300 jobs, more than three-fourths in manufacturing.  The European firms that now dominate US wind turbine sales developed technical and marketing expertise by serving their own home markets.  Expanding domestic demand will enable American firms to catch up.

Independent experts say that an RES, like the one the Energy & Natural Resources Committee reported on a strong bipartisan basis last year, could stimulate enough demand for wind turbines, solar panels, and other clean energy technologies to create 850,000 manufacturing jobs.  Last week, I introduced with my colleague from Kansas, Senator BROWNBACK, a standalone RES bill that is almost identical to the RES included in the bill the Committee reported.  Already, 27 Senators have signed on as cosponsors of our bill.  I remain confident that we can obtain the 60 votes necessary to proceed to and pass the bill.

But a demand-side strategy for clean energy cannot suffice; we must also focus on the supply side to ensure that policies spurring clean-energy demand will not merely be filled by imports.  And so my second call is to expand the Advanced Energy Project, or Section 48C, tax credit, that we created in the Recovery Act.  That credit allows qualifying companies to claim a credit for up to 30% of the costs of creating, expanding or reequpping facilities to manufacture clean energy technologies.  The Recovery Act authorized the Departments of Energy and the Treasury to award $2.3 billion in tax credits.  In the first round of allocations, the Departments fully exhausted that $2.3 billion; in January, tax credits were allocated to 183 projects in 43 states, representing the solar, wind, vehicle, nuclear, energy storage, smart grid, energy efficiency, and biofuel sectors.

The success stories are many.  Take, for instance, Suniva, a Georgia-based company that develops high-efficiency silicon photovoltaic cells.  As the result of its $5.7 million in tax credits, the venture-backed company has expanded its manufacturing from 33 MW to 170 MW, hiring an additional 60 workers and creating more than 100 construction jobs.  Many of its full-time employees are laid-off GM and Ford auto workers who obtained retraining in solar manufacturing. And Suniva, whose technology was initially developed at the nation's first DOE Center for Excellence in Photovoltaics, exports more than 90% of its solar cells to Europe, China, and India.

The 48C credit's vast oversubscription – the government received $10 billion in applications for $2.3 billion in tax credits – is a powerful demonstration of the potential for clean energy manufacturing in this country.  And so in December, I joined with Senators HATCH, STABENOW, and LUGAR in filing the American Clean Technology Manufacturing Leadership Act.  Our bill would add another $2.5 billion in tax credit allocation authority.  President Obama has since called for a $5 billion addition.  Based on testimony I received in my Finance Subcommittee, I support the President's proposed level.

Finally, we need to address financing challenges that companies face in establishing onshore clean energy manufacturing facilities.  Five years ago, Congress created a Loan Guarantee program at the Department of Energy.  But from its start, the program has faced bureaucratic delays.  So far, only 14 loan guarantees have been issued, all of them in the last 14 months and ten within the last year.  The Recovery Act promised to add $6 billion to the program, which would leverage $60 billion in new loans for clean energy projects.  But unfortunately, this Congress has seen fit to treat this funding as a piggybank, and has withdrawn $3.5 billion as offsets for unrelated purposes. We must restore that funding.

As we restore its funding, we must also retool the loan guarantee program.  Our Energy Committee-reported bill would create a robust successor program in the Clean Energy Deployment Administration, or CEDA.  CEDA would enhance the federal government's ability to make focused, "patient" investments to leverage and unlock private capital markets, in which the necessary funding for our clean energy future must ultimately be found.  By accelerating the technology revolution we need, CEDA will bring technologies from laboratory to marketplace – and in the process create hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

Alongside these three measures to retain and create clean energy manufacturing jobs, we must also pass two additional bipartisan packages.  The Energy Committee has unanimously reported a bill to address the largest oil spill in our nation's history.  The American people are waiting for us to enact it, and we should delay no further.  And the Tax Code is an increasingly important mechanism for delivering clean energy incentives; in fact, more than three in five federal dollars spent on energy are delivered through tax provisions.  I will return to the floor later this week to discuss a bipartisan package of incentives for clean renewable energy and energy efficiency.  I hope that package will receive priority attention as well.

Mr. PRESIDENT, some have said that the United States can never regain its footing in clean energy manufacturing. Those who doubt the potential of this sector and think that clean technology jobs can flow only to low-wage countries like China need only look to Germany, where employment in the clean energy industry is second only to the nation's strong automotive industry.

We are deservedly proud of our nation's tradition as a leader in R&D, innovation, and venture-backed investing.  With the right policies, we can guarantee that clean technology investment will come to our shores.  Let's enact the job creation legislation pending in the Senate today, and then move swiftly to enact legislation creating a Renewable Energy Standard and CEDA and expanding the Section 48C credit.

Mr. PRESIDENT, I yield the floor.