Posted on 09/20/2012 8:57:02 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Wind energy equipment manufacturer Siemens Energy Inc. will lay off 615 workers in Iowa, Kansas, and Florida in part because Congress has not renewed a tax credit for wind energy, the company said Tuesday.
Siemens said the biggest job losses will come in Fort Madison, Iowa, where 407 workers at a wind-turbine blade factory will be out of work. About 220 workers will be retained at the plant to support ongoing operations, spokeswoman Melanie Forbrick said in a statement.
About 146 workers are affected in Hutchinson, Kan., leaving 152 still working. In Orlando, Fla., about 62 workers will lose their jobs and about 150 will remain.
The company blamed difficult market conditions due to lack of congressional action on a wind energy tax credit as well as increased use of natural gas-fired power plants. It said it has worked for the past 10 months to address the uncertainties but needed to adjust its work force until demand for turbines returns.
"As a result, following the rapid ramp-up of the wind power industry over the past five years, the industry is facing a significant drop in new orders, and this has an unfortunate consequence on employment in this segment of the power industry," the company said in a statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at abclocal.go.com ...
Siemens does a lot more than wind technology.
But, but, without wind energy...how will we get to the stars?
Wind and Solar have their place, but we aint getting what people promise with the so called New technology.
It works great in remote applications that have limited demand, but there is a reason Oil and Coal are King.
You are funny guy!
Actually when I was like 11, I built an ion drive demonstration for school and that is what Nasa is using today in conjunction with solar panels for deep deep space exploration.
It is completely useless on earth.
...shipping out 600,000 barrels of oil a month.
True
I truly am sorry about all these people losing their jobs. Don’t know about the other cities but there just aren’t a lot of jobs to be had in Hutchinson, Kansas. They’ve had a really hot, dry summer with some really bad harvests in that area. Certainly no jobs in Wichita for them to go to.
Seems to me if this had proven to be such a good investment some enterprising individual would have stepped up and taken it over before now.
I worked with them for a while.
They aren’t that innovative anymore.
They use basic concepts and try to market them in new applications
This Application fails..
Just too much time on my hands....
But seriously folks......When I get the chance to build on some acreage, I fully plan on supplemental (key word: supplemental) energy using wind and solar, but would never consider it as a primary.
When the cold settled over the UK winter before last, almost no pressure differential existed to create wind, ergo, almost no energy available when they needed it the most.
I am upset Americans are losing their jobs, however, if we can stop this nonsense, maybe we can create jobs of substance.
The problem with their calculations is that without Gov subsidies the project was unviable.
The science was probably sound.
But that doesn’t make it sound for the application they were targeting.
Ion drive, nice.
Considering that space is filled predominantly with plasma...
Well that is grand if you can recover your cost over the life cycle of the system.
I too want to be off the grid.
It works.
What is the “wind energy tax credit”? Is that a credit for manufacturers of turbines or a credit to power companies or something else?
As a rule, the federal tax credit is what made wind energy "viable".
There was, as I recall, a 20-yr limit on the tax credit and most windfarms built over 20 years ago were abandoned when their tax credit ran out.
Its really slow building up a head of steam but it works.
Two logical solutions - Keystone Pipeline and Drill Baby Drill in Anwar
It ain’t no warp drive but a probe launched at the standard velocity and additional thrust via your gadget and the Voyager probes would have left the Solar system a while back.
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