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Solar shake-up at BP shows challenge of green jobs effort The recent decision by oil company BP PLC to close its solar panel manufacturing plant in Frederick, Md., shows the challenge faced by the Obama administration as it seeks to create hundreds of thousands of "green collar" jobs. More than 300 positions are being eliminated in the plant closure, which resulted from high operational costs and falling prices for solar panels, the company said. Though energy companies have taken federal incentives to create jobs in the United States, they are creating most of their jobs in Asia, analysts say. President Obama has said he intends to leverage $80 billion in stimulus spending into more than 700,000 renewable energy jobs. "We're creating green jobs, for sure, but they're in China or Malaysia or India," Maryland state Sen. Alex Mooney (R), whose district includes the BP facility, said in an interview yesterday. "We're losing these valuable manufacturing jobs, and that's a concern." BP's solar operations haven't recently provided profits for the company -- as of seven weeks ago, the division including wind and solar technology was losing about $183,000 an hour. But the company's decision to move production from the United States to foreign joint ventures still demonstrates an industrywide exodus of manufacturing jobs to places where labor is cheaper. "These days the manufacture of relatively commoditized products will occur where costs are lowest," said Reyad Fezzani, CEO of the company's solar unit, in an interview yesterday. "Of course government incentives are part of the equation, but frankly, they weren't the driving force in this equation. We just couldn't make the economics of that factory work anymore" (Joe Carroll, Bloomberg, March 29). Source: GreenWire |
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