I have been very encouraged by Barack Obama’s statements of support for green energy, but the time has come for him to act on that support. Especially in the area of solar, we have a narrow window of opportunity to move forward in both the manufacture and the deployment of solar components.

Pressure has begun to build for President Obama to make good on his State of the Union pledge to greenlight vast solar installations on public lands by year’s end, with supporters seemingly growing antsy that it’s either that or nothing in 2012. On Monday, about 20 solar industry advocates, electric utilities and major environmental groups, led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, urged Obama to formally put into effect rules for the country’s first solar program on government-owned lands by this fall. The national solar plan, unveiled by the Obama administration more than a year ago, would open 20 million acres of federal lands in six Western states to large-scale solar plants. The most essential part of the plan is to remove permitting roadblocks that have strangled renewable energy growth on public lands blessed with abundant sunshine and other green resources. Another part is to build transmission corridors to carry the sun-powered electricity to surrounding communities… …Obama’s State of the Union last week gave advocates an opportunity to trumpet the Interior Department’s solar plan and urge quick action. In his speech, the president said he was "directing" his administration to approve 10,000 megawatts of clean-electricity generation on public lands by the end of 2012, enough to power three million homes. (In total, solar power now provides about 30,000 megawatts, or roughly one-tenth of one percent of the nation’s electricity.) If the Obama administration is to reach that goal, "it must move quickly to put in place a smart solar energy program that speeds up permitting of projects," said Jim Lyons, senior director for renewable energy for Defenders of Wildlife, a Washington-based conservation group, in a collective statement of the solar plan supporters…

Inserted from <Truth-Out>

I could not agree more with this author.

In addition the nascent US solar component industry is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand they have to compete with fossil fuels that come to market at far less cost than they would, were they not so heavily subsidized by the US government. On the other hand they have to compete with Chinese solar components that are so heavily subsidized by the Chinese government that they cannot compete.