economic stimulus package. As it turns out, one of the first sessions in the conference that begins Thursday is an update on the important role that the stimulus program has in financing wind farms in the tax equity and debt markets.
As a prelude to the summit, Cleantech San Diego has organized an event this afternoon that is focused on the renaissance in wind power and to showcase some of the prominent wind power companies in the region—including enXco, Helix Wind, and Sempra Generation.
“We’re headed toward a renewable energy century,” enXco vice chairman James Walker told me by telephone Monday afternoon. Walker says investment in U.S. wind power production has leaped from $700 million invested to build about 400 megawatts’ worth of facilities in 2004 to roughly $25 billion that was invested in 9,922 megawatts of installed wind projects in 2009.
Walker, who spent eight years at the California Energy Commission under California Gov. Jerry Brown, says wind power is finally coming of age, “partly because the technology advances have reached a positive tipping point.”
Walker says wind power has developed in fits and starts over the past 30 years—advancing mostly at times when federal tax credits were in effect. “It’s a capital-intensive industry, and so you need to have broadband communications between the financial community and wind power R&D, and the manufacturing industry… Still, we need to work together to get the right long-term federal policies.”
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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