SHARE

By of the

Congress needs to extend a wind production tax credit to help manufacturers that serve the wind industry avoid layoffs, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Thursday.

Chu spoke after touring the Menomonee Valley factory opened by Ingeteam, a Spanish conglomerate that chose the city for its first U.S. factory and headquarters.

The wind production tax credit won't be permanent, as even the American Wind Energy Association has come out in support of a credit that will phase out over time as the cost of producing electricity from wind turbines becomes more and more competitive, Chu said.

The wind energy investment tax credits have been opposed by congressional Republicans who don't consider it a wise use of federal tax dollars to help support wind generation, which is more expensive per unit of energy to produce than traditional electricity generation sources like coal and natural gas.

Chu said continuing the tax credit - set to expire at the end of this year - was important to help send a signal that the U.S. supports clean energy and the manufacturing jobs linked with it.

If the tax credit ended in 10 years, then federal support for the wind industry will have lasted about 50 years, whereas tax credits for the oil and gas industry have been in place for a century, Chu said.

"The uncertainty that is now hitting his industry is causing some companies to start doing layoffs, and that's rough. You don't want to break this momentum," Chu said. "What we need more than anything else is not even a long-term commitment - it's a midterm commitment."

Ingeteam now has 53 employees and has projected it will reach full employment of 275 by 2015, Chief Executive Aitor Sores said.

The company has launched production on wind inverters and is looking for workers in the manufacturing and support staff as it gears up to launch production of wind generators later this summer, he said.

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said clean energy production and the manufacturing sector are "intertwined and are both important to this community. The clean energy is important to Milwaukee with companies like this one, which produce family-supporting wages and are hiring at a time when many, many people are out of work," he said.

Chu also appeared Thursday in Madison, touring the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The center is one of three research hubs created around the country to accelerate research aimed at overcoming scientific hurdles and bringing down the cost of energy production from biomass.

Critics of the Obama administration, including Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, have called for eliminating the wind energy tax credit. Johnson has signed on to a bill that would eliminate all federal energy tax credits, including not only those for alternative energy but those for oil and gas production as well.

The Republican National Committee criticized Chu and Barrett for a tour that hopes to "push their backward vision on energy in our state, and force the taxpayers of Wisconsin to pick up the check," Nicole Tieman, Wisconsin spokeswoman for the RNC, said in an email. "President Barack Obama has been gambling American taxpayer dollars on risky energy 'investments' such as Solyndra, which have produced nothing but more struggles for middle-class families around the country."

Chu's visit came as the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council released a report touting the significant opportunity the state has to leverage its manufacturing know-how and experience to increase jobs supplying the clean energy sector.

The state should follow the lead of Midwestern counterparts like Michigan, Indiana and Ohio that are focusing economic development in growth areas focused around new tech, also known as clean tech or clean energy technology.

"Wisconsin is at its heart a manufacturing state, and the question is what are we going to manufacture?" said Tom Eggert, who heads the council. "This whole new technology area is ripe with opportunities for Wisconsin and for the creation of jobs."

The state leads the nation in installations of energy-producing digesters that process cow manure and could expand its reach in production of components for digesters, Eggert said.

Ingeteam is part of a cluster of hundreds of businesses focused on making components for wind energy systems. The city of Madison recently saw the installation of a solar project whose components were entirely produced in-state, Eggert said.

In addition, the greater Milwaukee area and state are looking to foster growth of a supply chain focused on solar hot water, or solar thermal, systems. That's in addition to the well-documented efforts to build a freshwater research and technology hub and expand the region's efforts in the area of advanced batteries and energy storage steered by the likes of Johnson Controls Inc., ZBB Energy Corp. and the Wisconsin Energy Research Consortium.