Ohio begins to harvest potential bounty of jobs in green economy

By Joe Hallett & Dan Gearino

Columbus Dispatch

COLUMBUS

The stench instantly assaulted the senses, almost compelling a visitor to bolt from the bio-energy research lab. “If it smells funny here, it’s because we’re turning poop into energy,” said Mauricio Espinoza, spokesman for the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster.

In Akron, a Bridgestone executive envisioned the day when tires would be made from a new crop grown by Ohio farmers— Russian dandelions.

“The ‘green’ technology you start to see in tires is a big part of our future,” said Bob Handlos, vice president of product development, as he led a tour of the tire maker’s research center.

And in an old building on an Athens side street, Gov. Ted Strickland hoisted a shiny metal cylinder that can provide electrical power for a space satellite for a decade. Over the next four years, Sunpower will build 25 of the Stirling converters for NASA, said Mark Schweizer, the company”s chief executive officer.

Handing the cylinder back to Schweizer, Strickland asked how much one costs.

“On the order of $1 million each,” Schweizer replied.

“Really!” Strickland said. “Can I hold it again?”

From the largest corporate and government research labs to neighborhood factories and mom-and-pop garages across Ohio, inventors are discovering, developing and selling whiz-bang technology to power the state toward a new economic future.

Advancements in alternative energy sources, such as solar, wind and bio-fuels, foreshadow a day when Ohioans might power their cars with fuel derived from algae instead of gasoline from imported oil or use electricity generated from manure and crop waste instead of coal.

With Ohio’s once-mighty manufacturing economy continuing a three-decade free-fall, politicians of all stripes are proffering the green economy as the job-producer of the future.

“There will come a day when Ohio will be the undisputed home of advanced energy,” the governor said in January. “A day when we will have cast off those two tired little words that have been used to put us down — Rust Belt — because that’s not who we are. A day when the iconic image of the Texas oil rig will be eclipsed by the Ohio-made wind turbine and solar panel.”

From the politicians” rhetoric flows public policy and, ultimately, tax dollars. Between the beginning of 2007 and 2010, the state poured more than $2.6 billion into nearly 700 advanced-energy projects, including $1.8 billion toward finding ways to burn Ohio’s abundance of electricity-producing coal in a way that doesn’t spoil the environment.

The spending is necessary, the policymakers say, to spawn tomorrow’s jobs, including thousands for the non-degreed Ohio workers among the 433,800 since 1990 who lost manufacturing jobs. Instead of making bolts for car engines, Ohio workers will manufacture them for wind turbines. Instead of making glass for car windows, they will fit it into solar panels.

Farmers will produce food, electricity and fuel, building power-generating anaerobic digesters and bio-mass refineries next to grain elevators. In short, workers in the green economy will do many of the same jobs they did in the old economy with the added bonus, some say, of helping to save the planet.

“Green-collar jobs, really, are just blue-collar jobs being called something different,” said Eric Burkland, president of the Ohio Manufacturers Association.

But there are some other significant differences, starting with pay. Most start-up ventures are small, with wages that don’t come close to the pay and benefits of Ohio’s vanishing jobs. Few industries pay at that level anymore.

This provides a grim realization for some of the prospective students Donald Ball counsels at Stark State College in North Canton, where he is director of apprenticeship and industrial training. He is the one who tells laid-off auto workers that they might need several years of training to qualify for jobs that pay less than half of their former union wages.

“To have high wages, you need to have high skills,” he said.

That’s some of the bad news. The good news is that the state has advantages in attracting new jobs.

Ohio has some of the nation’s most ambitious renewable-energy standards, requiring that 25 percent of electricity come from alternative sources by 2025. This law, passed in 2008, includes annual benchmarks designed to encourage the development of solar and wind power within the state’s borders.

The utilities now need to meet the standards, which will not be easy. The companies fell short of the 2009 benchmark for solar power, which has caused consternation in the industry.

“There’s this chicken-and-egg problem going on,” said Terrence O’Donnell, a Columbus lawyer who represents renewable-energy firms. In this case, utilities say there isn’t enough solar-energy production, while solar companies say there hasn’t been enough investment from utilities to enable production.

Tax policy also plays a role. Lobbyists for the wind industry are asking the Ohio General Assembly to revise a property tax on utilities, which industry leaders say is an obstacle to renewable-energy projects.

Ohio’s energy standard, if the goals are met, would guarantee local demand for new energy technology. About 10 states have similar standards, and 29 states plus the District of Columbia have at least some standard.

Manufacturers who set up shop in Ohio to meet this demand find that the state has a vast but underused supply of manufacturing workers and buildings.

“Ohio has great manufacturing capability,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “There are a lot of factories that have been closed down, but you have a trained work force, you have real estate and buildings that can be reprogrammed to do other things. So, the capability is there.”

For all of Ohio’s assets, it has some drawbacks as a site for wind farms and solar arrays. The state has about 75 sunny and clear days per year, and it lacks the high sustained winds of the Great Plains states.

When it comes to sun and wind, the state is a series of small islands. The sun shines brightest in southwestern Ohio, according to the federal National Renewable Energy Lab. The wind blows strongest along Lake Erie in the Toledo area and in isolated parts of the northwestern and north-central parts of the state, the agency says.

That said, advocates for the solar- and wind-power industries argue that improvements in technology already have helped expand the menu of suitable locations. Like so many aspects of the green economy, the point is debatable.

The hope for green jobs must be tempered: The likelihood of one-for-one replacement of the thousands of lost manufacturing jobs is slim. An additional 173,100 of them vanished just since 2007. And there is no guarantee that green jobs won’t eventually move offshore.

Also, to fulfill the politicians’ prophesies and justify the public dollars they invest, there will be a tendency to over-classify new jobs, and even some old ones, as green jobs.

“Everyone agrees that the notion here is important,” said Ned Hill, dean of urban affairs at Cleveland State University. “But if you take a carpenter who’s building steps one day, and the next day that same carpenter is installing solar cells, they suddenly go through a green conversion.”