An eerie quiet has settled over the Walker Components plant in Denver, which assembles custom cables for a global wind turbine company. Orders are down from earlier in the year, and one-third of its employees have been laid off so far in 2012. “At the beginning of this year we just didn’t feel we had enough time, and now we’ve got too much time on our hands,” says one of its workers, 25-year-old Calvin Huddleston. “I really thought wind would be a sustainable business.” The wind energy boom President Barack Obama touted as key to his energy strategy has hit a wall in an election-year dispute over taxpayer support for renewable energy. The government poured billions of dollars into renewable energy, hoping to unleash a wave of good-paying, high-tech manufacturing jobs. But federal spending to support development of green energy has dropped sharply—75% since 2009—amid tea party criticism that it’s wasteful. Congress’s failure to extend past December the production tax credit, a wind-energy tax break first signed into law by Republican President George H.W. Bush, has contributed to job cutbacks from South Carolina to Washington state. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Obama prominently collided during the campaign over the fate of the tax credit. Romney has called for its expiration, while Obama supports its renewal. The credit stalled in Congress this summer in the face of opposition from House Republicans, and the last chance to extend it comes in December’s lame-duck session. The full story is available here.
Today’s poll question: Do you think the federal government should allow a tax break for the production of wind energy to expire?
