Nov 03 - International Herald Tribune

Like his uncle, his grandfather and many of their neighbors, Arie Versendaal spent decades working at the Maytag factory here, turning coils of steel into washing machines.

When the plant closed last year, taking 1,800 jobs out of this town of 16,000 people, it seemed a familiar story of U.S. industrial decline: another company town brought to its knees by the vagaries of global trade.

Except that Versendaal has a new factory job, at a plant here that makes blades for turbines that turn wind into electricity. Across the road, in the old Maytag factory, another company is building concrete towers to support the massive turbines. Together, the two plants are expected to employ nearly 700 people by early next year.

"Life's not over," Versendaal said. "For 35 years, I pounded my body to the ground. Now, I feel like I'm doing something beneficial for mankind and the United States. We've got to get used to depending on ourselves instead of something else, and wind is free. The wind is blowing out there for anybody to use."

From the faded steel enclaves of Pennsylvania to the reeling auto towns of Michigan and Ohio, state and local governments are aggressively courting manufacturing companies that supply wind energy farms, solar electricity plants and factories that turn crops into diesel fuel.

This courtship has less to do with the loftiest aims of renewable energy proponents - curbing greenhouse gas emissions and lessening U.S. dependence on foreign oil - and more to do with paychecks. In the face of rising unemployment, renewable energy has become a crucial source of good jobs, particularly for laid-off workers of the so-called Rust Belt.

With a U.S. presidential election campaign dominated by economic concerns, wind turbines and solar panels seem as ubiquitous in campaign advertisements as the American flag.

No one believes that renewable energy can fully replace what has been lost on the factory floor, where people with no college education have traditionally been able to finance middle-class lives.

Many at Maytag earned $20 an hour in addition to health benefits.

Versendaal now earns about $13 an hour.

Still, it is a beginning in a sector of the economy that has been marked by wrenching endings, potentially a second chance for factory workers accustomed to layoffs and diminished aspirations.

In West Branch, Iowa, a town of 2,000 people east of Iowa City, workers now assemble wind turbines in a former pump factory. In northwestern Ohio, glass factories suffering because of the downturn in the auto industry are retooling to make solar energy panels.

"The green we're interested in is cash," said Norman Johnston, who started a solar cell factory called Solar Fields in Toledo in 2003.

The potential market is big. In a report last year, the Energy Department said the United States could make wind energy the source of one-fifth of its electricity by 2030, up from about 2 percent today. That would require nearly $500 billion in new construction and add more than three million jobs, the report said. Much of the growth would be around the Great Lakes in the northeastern United States, the hardest-hit region in a country that has lost four million manufacturing jobs over the last decade.

Throw in solar energy along with generating power from crops, and the continued embrace of renewable energy would create as many as five million jobs by 2030, said Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adviser to the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama.

The financial crisis is expected to slow development, making investment harder to secure. But renewable energy has already gathered what analysts say is unstoppable momentum. In Texas, the oil developer T. Boone Pickens is creating what would be the largest wind farm in the world. Most states now require that a significant percentage of electricity be generated from wind, solar and biofuels, effectively giving the market a government mandate.

And many analysts expect the United States to eventually embrace some form of new regulatory system aimed at curbing global warming that would force coal-fired electricity plants to pay for the pollution they emit. That could make wind, solar and other alternative fuels competitive in terms of the cost of producing electricity.

Both presidential candidates have made expanding renewable energy a policy priority. Obama, the Democratic nominee, has outlined plans to spend $150 billion over the next decade to spur private companies to invest. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, has spoken more generally of the need for investment.

In June, more than 12,000 people and 770 exhibitors jammed a convention center in Houston for the annual American Wind Energy Association trade show.

"Five years ago, we were all walking around in Birkenstocks," said John Brown, managing director of a turbine manufacturer, Entegrity Wind Systems of Boulder, Colorado, which had a booth on the show floor. "Now it's all suits. You go to a seminar, and it's getting taught by lawyers and bankers."

So it goes in Iowa. Perched on the edge of the Great Plains - the so-called Saudi Arabia of wind - the state has rapidly become a leading manufacturing center for wind power equipment.

"We are blessed with certainly some of the best wind in the world," says Chet Culver, the governor of Iowa.

Maytag was born in Newton more than a century ago. Even after the company swelled into a global enterprise, its headquarters remained here, in the center of the state, east of Des Moines.

"Newton was an island," said Ted Johnson, the president of local chapter of the United Automobile Workers, which represented Maytag workers. "We saw autos go through hard times, other industries. But we still had meat on our barbecues."

The end began in the summer of 2005. Whirlpool, the appliance conglomerate, swallowed up Maytag. As the word spread that local jobs were doomed - Whirlpool was consolidating three factories' production into two - workers unloaded their memorabilia at Pappy's Antique Mall downtown: coffee mugs, buttons, award plaques.

"If it said Maytag on it, we bought it," says Susie Jones, the store manager. "At first, I thought the stuff had value. Then, it was out of the kindness of my heart. And now I don't have any heart left. It don't sell. People are mad at them. They ripped out our soul."

When the town needed a library, a park or a community college, Maytag lent a hand. The company was Newton's largest employer, its wages paying for tidy houses, new cars, weddings, retirement parties and funerals.

As Whirlpool made plans to close the factory, state and county economic development officials scrambled to attract new employers. In June 2007, the local government sent a team to the American Wind Energy Association show in Los Angeles. Weeks later, a company called TPI Composites arrived in Newton to have a look.

TPI, based in Arizona, makes wind turbine blades by layering strips of fiberglass into large molds, requiring a long work space. The Maytag plant was too short. So local officials showed TPI an undeveloped piece of land encircled by cornfields on the edge of town where a new plant could be built.

Although TPI was considering a site in Mexico with low labor costs, Newton had a better location. Rail lines and Interstate 80 connect it to the Great Plains in the central part of the United States, where the turbines are needed. Former Maytag employees were eager for work, and the community college was ready to teach them blade-making.

Newton won. In exchange for $6 million in tax sweeteners, TPI promised to hire 500 people by 2010. It has already hired about 225 and is on track to have a work force of 290 by mid-November.

"Getting 500 jobs in one swoop is like winning the lottery," says the mayor of Newton, Chaz Allen. "We don't have to just roll over and die."

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2008 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.