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Mercer, Lawrence visualize green-job potential
Green jobs are seen as crucial to economic development.
In the midst of the country’s bleak economic crisis, green jobs are being hailed as an oasis.
President-elect Barack Obama pushed them in his campaign, and Congresswoman-elect Kathy Dahlkemper stressed them in her bid to unseat Phil English in the 3rd District.
Now, as the guard gets ready to change in Washington, officials here in western Pennsylvania are starting to consider what they need to do to attract green jobs to their communities.
Dahlkemper, who’ll be sworn in Jan. 6, met with business and community leaders last week in Mercer County to get a feel for what their priorities are so she can represent them as discussion gets under way for an economic stimulus package in Congress.
Green jobs, she reiterated, are certainly an important part of that picture.
To the south, the Lawrence County commissioners also spoke last week of the importance of “greening up” the county’s job prospects.
They’re a way to stimulate the economy, put people to work and help the environment at the same time, officials have said.
Work could be available in plants on assembly lines that make components for green products such as wind turbines.
It could be available in the construction field, as companies retrofit buildings to make them more energy efficient.
“I believe a green revolution is coming,” Lawrence County Commissioner Richard DeBlasio told Dick Craig, a member of a county group called Progressive Democrats, when he brought up the subject at a commissioners meeting Tuesday.
“We know it’s coming and full steam ahead.”
The county itself is actually an employer in a large green project right now.
Johnson Controls, a company that programs temperature controls to save energy, is overseeing a retrofitting of all the county’s government buildings to make them more energy efficient. The project, which began in April, is a huge undertaking, said Edward Cvelbar, an account executive in building efficiency at the company’s Youngstown office.
While the company does the actual installation and programming of the controls, other work included in the project is subcontracted to local firms and contractors, he said.
Just to the north of New Castle in Neshannock Township, a company called Axion Power is charging up, with plans to add two partial shifts to make batteries that contain less lead than others on the market.
The company, which opened its New Castle plant in 2006, also makes a product called the Axion Power Cube. The cube is made up of 50 of the company’s batteries, said Stephanie Ellsworth, assistant to the chief technical officer. Applications for the cube, she said, would be in large businesses such as data centers and hospitals as a backup so that when a business loses power, it doesn’t lose its data. The cubes store solar and wind energy.
The company employs 50 people right now, Ellsworth said. Twenty-five of those people work assembling batteries, with those jobs starting at $9 an hour with benefits after six months. The added shifts, she said, would employ from five to 10 people on each.
The company also is hiring four more general laborers, two staff scientists, a mechanical engineer, a quality-control manager, a purchasing manager and a human resources manager.
In Mercer County, green jobs could help several communities facing a dwindling tax base because of population loss. Sharon is one such community, with the population falling since the late 1970s from 25,000 to around 15,000 now.
A former Westinghouse plant that closed in the late 1980s employed 10,000 people, and many of them lived in Sharon, said Mayor Bob Lucas.
“I’m interested in landing green jobs, because that’s our future,” Lucas said, pointing out that much of the old Westinghouse plant on Sharpsville Avenue, now owned by businessman Jim Winner, is open for development.
Three-hundred-thousand square feet of the 1 million-square-foot plant could be manufacturing space, and 200,000 square feet of it could be for offices, laboratories and light industry, said Jack Campbell, vice president of Winner Global LLC.
Campbell said the company is planning to seek funds to rehabilitate the plant and to develop about 60,000 square feet into a business incubator to help primarily energy technology startups.
The businesses would be allowed to stay in the building rent-free and receive mentoring with the idea that, as they expand and their products become viable, they would move on to produce the products at the plant and create jobs, he said.
He said that so far, a company that is developing reverse osmosis to take salt out of saltwater has shown an interest in the plant, and so has a company involved in converting energy from windmills.
Winner also has its own product in development, he said. It’s a system that cleans acid mine drainage, allowing clean water to be discharged into waterways. Byproducts of the cleaning, potassium sulfate and ferris sulfate, can be sold as fertilizer, he said.
He said the company is trying to attract money from the federal and state governments to redevelop and rehabilitate the plant, which in itself would be a green project.
“We’re looking at rehabbing it green, with alternative energy sources and recyclable products. It could be up to a $30 million project,” he said.
He said Jim Winner would match government funds. “Mr. Winner’s made a commitment to bring jobs here.”
Dahlkemper said her visit to the county last week was primarily fact-finding, as she asked business and community leaders about their concerns and priorities.
She said attracting green jobs to the area might mean making some changes in incentives at the state or local level.
“I want to hear from businesses and those working on economic development to find out what I can do to help them attract businesses,” she said. “With the economic situation the way it is, how can we leverage that taxpayer money? How can we leverage that to turn it greener?”