Biden’s green energy push pits jobs against lower costs
Patricia Fahy, a New York state legislator, celebrated when a new development project for the Port of Albany — the country’s first assembly plant dedicated to building offshore wind towers — was approved in January.
“I was doing cartwheels,” said Fahy, who represents the area.
But she was soon caught in a political bind.
A powerful union informed her that most of the equipment for New York’s big investment in offshore windmills would not be built by American workers but would come from abroad. Yet when Fahy proposed legislation to press developers to use locally made parts, she met opposition from environmentalists and wind industry officials. “They were like, ‘Oh, God, don’t cause us any problems,’ ” she recalled.
Since President Joe Biden’s election, Democrats have extolled the win-win allure of the transition from fossil fuels, saying it can help avert a climate crisis while putting millions to work. “For too long we’ve failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis: jobs, jobs, jobs,” Biden told Congress last month.
But there is a tension between the goals of industrial workers and those of environmentalists — groups that Democrats count as politically crucial. The greater the emphasis on domestic manufacturing, the more expensive renewable energy will be, at least initially, and the longer it could take to meet renewable-energy targets.
“It’s a classic trade-off,” said Anne Reynolds, who heads the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, a coalition of environmental and industry groups. “It would be better if we manufactured more solar panels in the U.S. But other countries invested public money for a decade. That’s why it’s cheaper to build them there.”
There are some data to support the contention that climate goals can create jobs.
The consulting firm Wood Mackenzie expects tens of thousands of new jobs per year later this decade just in offshore wind, an industry that barely exists in the United States today.
That said, there is virtually no domestic supply chain specifically for offshore wind, an industry that Biden hopes to see grow from roughly a halfdozen turbines in the water today to thousands over the next decade. That supply chain is largely in Europe.
But labor groups worry that construction and installation jobs will be low paying and temporary. They say only manufacturing has traditionally offered higher pay and benefits and can sustain a workforce.
As a result, labor leaders are pressing the administration to attach strict conditions to the subsidies it provides for green equipment.
“We’re going to be demanding that the domestic content on this stuff has to be really high,” said Thomas Conway, president of the United Steelworkers union and a Biden ally.