By Nicholas Riccardi
DENVER (AP) – An eerie quiet has settled over the Walker Components plant, 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 this year.
“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,” one of its workers, 25-year-old Calvin Huddleston said. “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 percent since 2009 – amid tea party criticism that it’s wasteful. Congress’ 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.
