This column in the March issue of Quoted Cleantech made reference to the bullish long-term outlook for the cleantech industry now that the new US administration is releasing billions of dollars of stimulus package funds to help finance energy efficiency schemes, smart grid projects and a host of other cleantech-related activities in that country. Also mentioned was the fact that the UK’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, wanted to create 400,000 ‘green jobs’ in the UK over the next eight years.
Times are tough on both sides of the Atlantic, so government moves to stimulate the economy by helping the cleantech sector should be welcomed not just by investors, but also by engineers, technicians and other workers who are either already employed by the cleantech sector or are seeking employment within it.
However, the UK does not have a good track record when it comes to keeping highly-technical manufacturing jobs within its shores. The country has some great centres of excellence for research and development, but when the time comes to start manufacturing the products that result from its innovations too often the task of making those products goes abroad.
This does not refer to the simple ‘screwdriver’ production jobs, such as building microwave ovens or assembling cars, which are easy to transfer to developing countries like China. There are also plenty of very technical manufacturing jobs in new industries that could, and should, be retained within the UK but are ending up in other First World nations. An example is in the area of flexible electronic displays – a burgeoning technology that promises a range of applications. A leading UK company in this sector, Cambridge University spinout Plastic Logic, decided in 2006 to locate its new plastic displays manufacturing plant in Saxony rather than the UK, attracted by financial incentives from the German region’s government.
Now, we hear that workers at a Vestas wind turbine plant on the Isle of Wight (off England’s southern coast) are holding a sit-in protest because that company is planning to shut the plant, which makes turbine blades. So, if a leading cleantech business like Vestas cannot be incentivised to keep production in the UK, what hope is there that the cleantech industry as a whole will find the country attractive enough to employ 400,000 people?
Recent celebrations of the huge engineering and organisational drive that led to the US landing men on the Moon 40 years ago have occasioned inevitable comparisons with the effort the world needs to make now in order to lower carbon emissions and fight climate change. It is a shame that, just as the UK has had only a minimal involvement in Europe’s own space programme since the European Space Agency was founded in 1975, its current Government’s much-touted intention to create jobs through investing in clean technologies is beginning to look like so much hot air.
Jon Mainwaring
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