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Politics
»There was a lot of hoopla, and a lot of an-
nouncements were made, but then there
was a long period of silence and nothing
happening,« said John Baumstark, CEO of
Atlanta, Georgia-based solar cell manufac-
turer Suniva in September. »The MTC [Ad-
vanced Energy Manufacturing Tax Credit]
was passed very early in the administra-
tion, and the rules for applying just came
out within the last 30 days.«
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Although an overall supporter of the
stimulus package and its impact on PV,
Baumstark’s criticism isn’t limited to
speed; it’s also about content, particu-
larly the fact that the MTC is a 30 percent
tax credit rather than a cash grant. »If it’s
a cash grant it would be tangible, and it
would hopefully be immediate,« he says.
»If you spent $100 million on a factory
and you could count on $30 million in
cash coming back quickly, you could
put that to work to create more jobs and
further investments in R&D. If it’s a tax
credit, and you’ve built a $100 million
factory, the first thing you have to do is
have a $30 million tax liability.«
Baumstark is also critical of the ar-
gument that big government programs
take time to set up properly and execute
correctly; an argument the administra-
tion has made by saying that its efforts
are designed to build the infrastructure
behind a 20-year energy plan. He cites
the efforts the Chinese have made re-
cently to provide land and funding for
its PV manufacturers, an aggressive ap-
proach he says the US needs to emulate
if it’s to take advantage of the opportu-
nity for US manufacturers to serve the
domestic market. »It’s not just the Chi-
nese, it’s other people targeting the US,
and it’s taking a while to get policy in
place to support US manufacturing, US
job creation and US leadership in solar,«
says Baumstark. It’s like »moving the
Titanic,« he says, »but we have to find
some ways to move quickly here.«
Some argue that political calculations
have sapped some of the possible effec-
tiveness of the stimulus when it comes
to PV. In August, Congress passed, and
President Obama signed, an extension of
the Cash for Clunkers program, an ini-
State assistance: each state is using federal stimulus money in different ways. Some are creating or improving
solar incentive programs. Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, shown here, is using stimulus funds to install
PV on state owned property
tiative popular among auto dealers and
car buyers. The program gave consum-
ers a $3,500 to $4,500 rebate for trading
in their low fuel efficiency vehicles to
buy higher fuel efficiency cars. The $2
billion for the Cash for Clunkers exten-
sion came straight from the DOE’s loan
guarantee program, which means only
$750 million remains for commercial
projects, not all of which will go to PV.
»The loan guarantee program as it stands
today is not going to have any meaning-
ful impact,« says Vishal Shah, an ana-
lyst with Barclays Capital, who doesn’t
believe promises from House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi and others that the fund-
ing will be replenished, eventually.
Moving faster
Shah is not prepared to say that the
stimulus funding has been a failure, but
he does say that it’s clear that it has not
lived up to expectations. »I think the
impact, when we were initially talking
about providing stimulus, was expect-
ed to be a lot higher,« says Shah. After
the Cash for Clunkers announcement,
Shah reduced his projection for total
installed PV in the US in 2010 from
1.05 GW to 750 MW, although he said
that reduction in funding wasn’t the
only reason for the downgrade.
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The argument can be made, obvious-
ly, that when expectations are too high,
people are bound to be disappointed
– case in point is some of the disap-
pointment already being expressed by
liberal Democrats regarding the Obama
administration’s progress as a whole.
Certainly, the pace of the stimulus
has picked up, and with the process of
awarding stimulus money clearly ac-
celerating, Obama officials are out pro-
moting their progress in earnest.
At the Renewable Energy Finance Fo-
rum-West in San Francisco in late Sep-
tember, Matt Rogers, the DOE’s point
man for stimulus spending, said that
the department has already handed out
$17 billion in stimulus dollars, and ex-
pected that number to rise to $30 billion
by the end of the year. Expect »a very ex-
citing fall,« Rogers told the audience.
Greg Shepperd, chief research officer
with California-based iSuppli Corpora-
tion, agrees that the stimulus’ impact will
be felt far into the the future. Shepperd
sees the US market going from 500 MW in
2009 to 1 GW in 2010. »We wouldn’t be
seeing the doubling of the market without
the incentives,« he says. »I think it has had
a positive effect, particularly counteract-
ing the horrible economic environment
the economy has fallen into.« Chris Warren
November 2009
Associated Press GmbH