Restoring Leadership in U.S. Solar Manufacturing

After the end of the Second World War virtually anything produced anywhere in the world could and would be produced in the United States. American corporations founded many industries that are ubiquitous around the world today. We not only created the nuclear weapon, but its peaceful counterpart nuclear energy.

We created the first telephone systems, and then the first mobile phone systems.

We created the automobile and were once major champions of passenger rail.

We created the personal computer as well as the Internet, which has perhaps done more to integrate the world than any other product or system in existence today.

Each of the aforementioned industries are on a collective list of those which began in the U.S. but achieved their modern glory elsewhere. The top transportation infrastructure is found outside the U.S., the largest automaker in the world in Japanese, and European nations have drastically reduced their oil and coal dependence with high capacities of nuclear energy. While most of the top hardware and software firms are still American, the devices are produced in large part overseas; and competitors are rapidly making up ground in computing and electronics from around the globe.

The U.S. has done little to maintain its place of prominence as the rest of the world caught up and eventually surpassed us. Now, we may have another industry to add to our growing list of losses.

According to http://climateprogress.org/2010/03/06/us-share-of-global-solar-manufactu...
">ClimateProgress.org, the United States could take our several proverbial birds with a single stone if it were to take a stand on solar energy production. At its peak in 1995 nearly 45 percent of the global market share for photovoltaic cells (PV) was dominated by the United States. Our producers made nearly half of the solar cells on the planet, but at the time it was a small-scale venture.

This was before the global consensus was established on the drawbacks of carbon emissions. It was before high oil costs made oil-fired power facilities an economic impossibility. It was before the rest of the world had much interest in solar energy; an industry with huge overhead costs and relatively small demand.

Now, fifteen years hence, the game has completely changed. Solar energy via PV cells represented a $20 billion industry in 2007. Some projections show the industry doubling or tripling in value within the next ten years.

Just as the clean energy sector is coming into its own, the United States is quickly being phased out. We no longer dominate nearly half of the market for PV or solar energy; we now represent just under one-tenth of the entire global industry. After a conservative Congress came into power in 1996, and a conservative administration took the White House from 2000-2008, American incentives for clean energy virtually evaporated.

The rest of the world recognized a potential growth sector and began heavily investing in their own wind, solar, and alternative production. Meanwhile, the U.S. focused on inefficient ethanol and increased reliance on foreign oil imports.

Clean energy solutions will almost certainly dominate energy production in the future. Building the solar collectors and wind farms will create billions of dollars in profit and investment opportunities, and create millions of jobs in production, maintenance and development.

China is already the world’s largest producer of alternative energy products. It will soon become the world’s largest market for those products, and American companies will have no ability to compete against entrenched state-funded competition. If the United States hopes to jump back on the bandwagon it absolutely must act soon with major government incentives for businesses to invest in alternative energy.