Jan 13 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - George Pyle The Buffalo News, N.Y.


Buffalo Niagara Enterprise on Tuesday rolled out what it called "third-party validation" that the alternative energy industry can hold the key to turning this part of the Rust Belt green.

"With its diverse manufacturing heritage and skilled work force, the region can become a key asset in U. S. efforts to expand its competitive presence in emerging green industries and technologies," wrote consultant Keith W. Rabin, president of KWR International.

"This opportunity builds off the region's existing strengths to help create a transformative and supporting business environment where 'Industry Creates Energy.' "

The 162-page report, commissioned by Buffalo Niagara Enterprise and funded by a grant from the electric utility National Grid, argued that such factors as idled industrial facilities, skilled work force, varied educational institutions and strategic location should position the region to respond to the nation's call for renewable, secure and environmentally friendly energy sources.

 In his presentation Tuesday in the downtown offices of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, Rabin said the industrial base of much of the rest of the nation has declined the same way Buffalo's did decades ago. Just as Buffalo led the decline, it now can lead the recovery, he said.

"Buffalo Niagara can establish itself as America's reindustrialization model in the new green economy and serve as a laboratory for restoring manufacturing jobs," Rabin said.

Beyond the idled factories and the underemployed worker base, Rabin said, Western New York offers the climate and resources necessary to generate wind, solar and water power, plus the transportation network necessary to ship products that could be manufactured here.

Part of the challenge, though, will be making investors and customers see that potential.

"This region does not have a green image, which is important to green-economy investors," Rabin said. "On the other hand, it has set the expectations pretty low and not that hard to overcome."

Local business leaders, educators,

investors and public officials will have to get the word out, the consultant said.

"You've got to get into people's face," he said, "in a nice, polite, diplomatic way."

Using green technology locally, generating power, retrofitting buildings and adopting green building codes, Rabin said, also would help set an example and enhance the region's brand with the growing number of businesses and localities that care about such efforts.

Renewable energy sources are crucial to the national economy, Rabin said, and the federal government alone is dangling more than $1 trillion in front of those who can best develop them. The concept involves not only reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental hazards, but also deriving the nation's energy from a source that isn't dug out of the ground in far-away nations, often led by people who have no love for the United States.

Unlike the current economy based so heavily on fossil fuels, Rabin said, a sustainable energy future in the United States will combine many sources, depending on local availability and creativity.

He said fulfilling the promise of a renewable energy economy locally is something that need not, and should not, require state or federal government reforms.

"You can't make it into something that's hopeless, or something that can't happen until Albany changes or until the federal government changes," Rabin said.

That didn't stop Andrew J. Rudnick, president of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, from following Rabin's presentation with one in which he repeated his frequent call for government reform.

"The overall tax and regulatory culture of our state relative to other states simply has to change," he said.

In the context of growing the renewable energy industry locally, Rudnick singled out the need for immigration reform that would allow more skilled workers to come to the United States and the state's decisions on how to meet 21st century energy needs.

"We do not have a state energy policy," Rudnick said. "We have state energy policies."

The KWR report, "Where Industry Creates Energy," is available at www.buffaloniagara.org under the heading: Industry Clusters/Renewable Energy.

gpyle@buffnews.com

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