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NEW ORLEANS, La. – A new study suggests that Louisiana will see a surge in green jobs in the next 10 years.

The study, conducted by the Louisiana Workforce Commission, predicts that green jobs will grow 13.8 percent by 2021, while overall job growth will increase only 8 percent.

With Louisiana’s annual growth rates expected to be 0.8 percent in 2012 and 0.9 percent in 2013, the study suggests that the Pelican State will be increasingly dependent on green technology for future economic growth.

According to Stephen Barnes, assistant professor at LSU’s Division of Economic Development, the number of green jobs created will depend heavily on public and private investment.

Critics of the study, including Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, contend that any surge in green jobs will require consistent government assistance.

“As the federal government falls deeper into bankruptcy and Louisiana continues to wrestle ballooning budget deficits each fiscal year, it is hard to believe that taxpayers can continue to provide consistent and long-term financing for the green industry.”

Although environmentalism is often attributed to the rise of the green movement, CEO Michael Hecht of Greater New Orleans Inc., a regional economic development group, claims that the rise in the demand for green technologies is a product of the free market.

Hecht claims that large multinational corporations like Freeport McMoRan, Kraft Foods, Dow Jones and Nike would not be involved in green efforts if the projects would not be profitable.

However, Briggs is skeptical, pointing to the recent Solyndra scandal as an example of what the green industry will look like in Louisiana.

“Time and time again we see that companies who do not take capital risks in the market and are propped up with taxpayer cash cannot support long-term productivity or job retention. We may see a surge in green jobs, but we will most certainly see a bust as well.”

LSU researchers define green jobs as “[any job that helps] protect or restore the environment, or conserve natural resources”.

“There are over 1900 vacancies in the green economy in [Louisiana],” said Curt Eysink, Executive Director of the Louisiana Workforce Commission.

Half of the jobs require specialized training or certificates, but Eysink contends that there are hundreds of public and private training programs throughout Louisiana.

Currently, Baton Rouge has the most green jobs in Louisiana with 28 percent, followed by New Orleans with 22 percent and Lafayette 18 percent, respectively.

Much of the growth over the next decade in green technologies is expected to take place in New Orleans, where large public and private investments are planned to grow green energy, construction, water management, manufacturing and waste management technologies.

Original Article

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By Laura Zuckerman

SALMON, Idaho | Thu Jul 14, 2011 6:13pm EDT

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – The Obama administration is evaluating a plan to allow a 200-mile corridor for wind energy development from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico that would allow for killing endangered whooping cranes.

The government’s environmental review will consider a permit sought by 19 energy developers that would permit turbines and transmission lines on non-federal lands in nine states from Montana to the Texas coast, overlapping with the migratory route of the cranes.

The permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would allow the projects to “take” an unspecified number of endangered species. Under the Endangered Species Act, “take” is defined as killing or injuring an endangered species

The government can issue permits to kill or injure listed species with no penalties or risks of lawsuits to developers who agree to craft conservation plans.

According to federal officials, the large scale of the review will help streamline the permitting process by lumping many projects into a single study.

The Obama Administration has been working to speed development of renewable energy projects by improving coordination among various state and federal agencies.

Environmentalists, however, say the “fast track” process results in inadequate environmental reviews.

The Administration’s latest wind energy proposal raises concerns among wildlife advocates because the developments would overlap with habitat imperiled birds such as whooping cranes rely on, including the Central Flyway, a migratory path that cuts through North America’s midsection between the Arctic and the Tropics.

The leading cause of death for the nation’s last historic population of whooping cranes, which stand at 5 feet and have a wingspan of more than 7 feet, is overhead utility lines, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Conservationists say the Central Flyway’s population of 280 cranes — which make a refueling stop along Platte River in Nebraska along with tens of thousands of sandhill cranes and snow geese — would suffer with the loss of just a single adult breeding bird.

‘RAREST OF BIRDS’

“I can hardly imagine what the government is thinking. Whooping cranes are the rarest of all the cranes, the rarest of American birds,” said Paul Johnsgard, author of several books on the cranes and professor emeritus of ornithology at the University of Nebraska.

Fish & Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe said wind energy is crucial to the nation’s future economic and environmental security, which is why the agency is paving the way for a renewable energy project with an undetermined number of wind turbines generating an unidentified amount of electricity along the 200-mile-wide corridor.

“We will do our part to facilitate development of wind energy resources, while ensuring that they are sited and designed in ways that minimize and avoid negative impacts to fish and wildlife,” he said in a statement.

Whooping cranes, North America’s tallest bird, once numbered in the tens of thousands before hunting and habitat loss caused their populations to plummet to 16 in the 1930s.

The cranes, which annually migrate thousands of miles from wintering grounds in coastal Texas to breeding and nesting areas in Alberta, Canada, were at the forefront of an emerging wildlife conservation movement in the 1960s that gave rise to a series of landmark laws aimed at preventing extinctions of rare and declining animals.

Whooping cranes were among the first creatures added to an early version of the Endangered Species Act in 1967.

Few other populations of whooping cranes exist in the United States, with an introduced flock in central Florida that does not migrate and a fledging group in Wisconsin that biologists have trained to fly to the winter refuge of Florida by following ultralight aircraft.

Attempts to establish crane populations elsewhere, including Idaho and Colorado, have failed.

Government scientists have not yet determined how many whooping cranes, other threatened and endangered birds and imperiled bats would be killed or otherwise harmed because of the wind project, said Amelia Orton-Palmer, conservation planner with the service.

“It’s so early in the process we won’t begin to speculate on what that might be,” she said.

Original Article

HOUMA — Offshore windmills used to create energy are unfamiliar territory to most in south Louisiana.

But some say the technology, which is undergoing a big push for development by the Obama administration, could be a new growth area for shipbuilding and fabrication companies. Trade associations, including the Shipbuilders Council of America, say clusters of wind turbines called “farms” will need offshore platform structures and boats to service them. And at least one local company, Gulf Island Fabrication of Houma, has been following the projects for three years or so and has already placed bids on equipment.

“Basically we would build a fixed platform in the shallow water … in up to about 200 feet,” CEO Kerry Chauvin said. “This would be a similar type structure to what we’ve done in the Gulf of Mexico (for oil platforms).”

It’s not something that will happen overnight, or even in the next year. But given a slow market for deepwater projects, it could be a new growth market. “We sure hope so,” Chauvin said.

The idea of offshore wind power isn’t new: Europe has been building the projects since the early 1990s and has more than 800 turbines that provide energy to nine countries. No such developments currently exist in the United States.

The project that has made the most progress so far is Cape Wind, a $2.5 billion project that would place 130 wind turbines off coastal Massachusetts. It was finally approved in April after years of citizen opposition and bureaucratic delays, which had to a large extent deterred investment in other projects. But roughly 20 other projects are in the permitting pipeline, including those in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes.

The potential is wide: According to a government study published in September by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, if all the potential offshore wind power in U.S. waters were harnessed, it could produce quadruple the country’s present electric demand.

The Department of the Interior late last month rolled out a program late last month that would simplify regulations to start leasing for wind projects off the Atlantic coast as early as next year.

“Our ‘Smart from the Start’ initiative for Atlantic wind will allow us to identify priority wind-energy areas for potential development, improve our coordination with local, state and federal partners, and accelerate the leasing process,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in the department’s announcement of the project. “If we are wise with our planning, we can help build a robust and environmentally responsible offshore renewable energy program that creates jobs here at home.” Habib Dagher is a professor of structural engineering at the University of Maine, part of a team that has been working to develop the technology for “deepwater” offshore wind farms located more than 20 miles off the coast.

The political fate of the program is still uncertain, but he still sees a “heightened level of interest with the Obama administration to move the wind programs forward,” he said.

Offshore wind power presents a number of advantages, Dagher said. First, in many locations the wind blows more strongly offshore than inland, and areas with high potential for wind power generation are close to large coastal cities like Boston and New York City.

“Offshore wind is much steadier and stronger than inland wind,” Dagher said. “You can make the turbines quite a bit bigger.”

Locating the turbines offshore also removes the noise and eyesore elements that have frustrated communities that have found the farms disruptive. If placed far enough offshore, they’re also out of sight.

In addition, wind power lacks the pollution generated by oil and gas, and it’s a renewable resource that won’t run out.

But the proposals still face many challenges. For one, transmission lines would need to be established to carry the electricity to shore. That’s an effort that got a major boost in October when Google agreed to invest $5 billion to build a 350-mile transmission “backbone” that would supply up to 1.9 million households from New Jersey to Virginia.

“The AWC backbone will be built around offshore power hubs that will collect the power from multiple offshore wind farms and deliver it efficiently via sub-sea cables to the strongest, highest capacity parts of the land-based transmission system,” said Google’s announcement. “This system will act as a superhighway for clean energy.”

The technology is still expensive, and costs more to install and produce than conventional energy.

But much of the market for engineering and construction of the turbines, tools, ships and other products surrounding the technology is still wide open, says Sean O’Neill, founder of the Ocean Renewable Energy Coalition. The OREC group is made up of more than 40 companies and other groups with an interest in exploring the technology, including defense contractor Lockheed Martin and Chevron Technology Ventures.

“You’re starting to see shipbuilders and other offshore contractors getting much more excited about this field, and looking to diversify what they’re doing,” O’Neill said. “There are over 100 different technologies being focused on worldwide. For each of those technologies the answer is going to be different.”

For instance, Dagher said his university is working with a consortium of 35 companies, including oil-and-gas firms, to develop the technology to produce floating platforms for wind turbines. They are similar to the floating deepwater rigs used to drill for oil, except much smaller. The oil rigs can cost up to $1 billion each, but the floating turbines are closer to $15 million, he said.

“There are a lot of job-creation opportunities for the oil-and-gas business,” he said. “The more business opportunities you have, the better off we all are.”

He sees offshore wind and oil-and-gas not in opposition, but a trend of overall innovation within energy production, comparing it to the transition between horse-drawn carts to automobiles.

“We’re going to need all the above (energy sources) as we move forward,” Dagher said. “There will be a time when oil will not be abundant anymore. There will be a time where there’s going to be a transformation of energy. The sooner we start, the better off we’re going to be.”

The idea of oil-and-gas companies expanding into offshore wind has its skeptics from both sides. Don Briggs, president of the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, said he knew of no Louisiana oil-related companies other than Gulf Island that were getting involved with the market as of yet.

“I don’t discourage wind,” he said. But “that’s not going to run the engines of this country.”

Original Article