DENVER—Gov. Bill Ritter made his goal to rebuild Colorado’s economy around renewable energy jobs his top priority four years ago, and when President Barack Obama adopted it, Ritter was quick to take credit.
On Friday, Ritter signed his final “new energy economy” bills, but critics question the number of jobs that are being created and who will pay. The bills will create a smart grid task force, start a green jobs training program and set up a green jobs advisory council.
Since taking office in 2007, Ritter has signed nearly 60 pieces of clean-energy legislation, including new laws to increase the requirement that utilities must get 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020 to 30 percent.
Other bills have offered incentives and loans to homeowners to go solar and made it easier to finance renewable energy by folding it into a home mortgage.
“We are creating jobs, attracting companies, reducing energy consumption and advancing high-tech projects that will continue to bear fruit for decades to come,” Ritter said at a warehouse filled with military veterans training for new careers in renewable energy.
“The New Energy Economy” was a well-known catch phrase in Colorado before Obama talked about it during his 2008 campaign and while stumping last year for his economic recovery plan.
Ritter used it as a slogan in his 2006 gubernatorial race, and it became a rallying cry as the Legislature in 2007 required that Colorado utilities get 20 percent of their power from renewable energy sources by 2020.
Ritter, who is not running for re-election this year, has said his new energy economy has created “tens of thousands” of new jobs, though no one can say exactly how many. Studies vary widely, from 20,000 to 90,000 over the next decade.
What they can say is that Colorado added 2,500 jobs from Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, which made Colorado its North American manufacturing hub, and 700 jobs from SMA Solar, which is opening a manufacturing plant in Colorado this summer, its first outside Germany.
Rep. Amy Stephens, a Republican from Monument, said those jobs came at a huge price requiring specialized training and subsidies that will be borne by rate payers and taxpayers.
She said it also came at the expense of other industries that need money to retrain their workers, and they didn’t get it, including software programmers and construction workers.
“It was green this and green that, everything green got an exclusion at the expense of everything else,” Stephens said.
Earlier this year, Environment Colorado released a study that said a new law increasing the renewable energy standard to 30 percent would create 23,450 jobs in solar generation over the next 10 years. But researchers acknowledged that only 152 of those jobs would last for two years or more.
The remaining jobs would be short-term construction and support jobs, and supporters acknowledge those projects will need government subsidies of up 50 percent to cover the cost to make it affordable.
Holly Horton, a vice president for SunRun, which finances home solar projects, said the benefits of those jobs trickle down to businesses in local communities when new companies buy new products.
She said the oil industry has been subsidized for decades and renewable energy needs the same kind of help if it’s going to expand.
“This is a nascent industry,” she said.
