Posted 09.01.2009

Power glide: Bill Ritter has bet his future on the new energy economy

He's about to find out how much political clout it really can generate

By Robert Schwab

Abound Solar’s new factory on Interstate 25 near Loveland is the antithesis of gritty traditional manufacturing. From the white interior to the casually dressed workers making components in air-conditioned comfort, it embodies the cool, clean look of a 21st century workplace – a linchpin in Gov. Bill Ritter’s “new energy economy.”

Now 200 workers strong, Abound plans to double its work force after it completes the renovated factory. The solar panels it makes are recyclable; their development is a spinoff from research done at Colorado State University. The company is financed by $150 million in private investment.

Mark Chen, the company’s young marketing director, told reporters and other visitors on a recent tour that Abound eventually plans to produce enough solar panels annually to supply electricity to 70,000 homes for a year. The company is the epitome of the Colorado clean-tech industry Ritter has championed and continues to tout as he prepares to seek a second term.

After speaking to a business group in July, Ritter stood in the foyer of Denver’s Seawell Ballroom answering questions about his record, including whether he was jumping on the “green” bandwagon as some of his critics have charged. It was getting warm, and Ritter started pulling off his suit jacket, revealing a crisp yellow shirt, bright as the sun.

“Listen,” he said. “I was just named by some group the greenest governor in America. I didn’t set out to be that. I just got there because we keep building public policy that will support this clean energy ecosystem, this new energy economy ecosystem.”

Ritter recently visited Silicon Valley, where he met with executives at Kleiner Perkins, the California venture capital firm that hired former vice president Al Gore after he won the Nobel Prize for speaking out about global warming.

“We were talking to them about information/communication technology,” Ritter said. “And they said: ‘What we do know is Colorado has created the kind of ecosystem that we created here in the Silicon Valley around IT.’”

As Ritter sees it, his administration had a lot to do with helping to create that ecosystem.

“We came in, and we doubled our renewable energy standard; we put in place net metering,” Ritter said. “We put in place incentives for investor-owned utilities to build out transmission from places where there is renewable energy.”

The Governor’s Energy Office has a list of accomplishments Ritter’s administration claims helped fuel the evolution of Colorado as a hub for “green” energy economic development. But whether those accomplishments are enough to convince voters — especially business voters — that the governor deserves a second term, is a question that naturally follows for a Democratic elected official who already has drawn announced Republican opposition for his re-election bid in another year.

“I think he is, on the economy, extremely weak and vulnerable, looking at 2010,” said state Sen. Josh Penry, one of those announced Republican opponents. Penry has yet to win the nomination of his party and faces two other announced rivals for the nod.

But as minority leader of the Senate during the last session of the Legislature, his criticism of the governor resonated over policy debates, marking Republican targets for where the incumbent could be attacked.

Those targets include Ritter’s record on new energy.

“The problem isn’t that he has promoted renewables,” Penry said. “The problem is he’s promoted renewables at the expense of so many other important forms of energy. (He’s) appointed anti-drilling activists to the oil and gas commission; pushed a climate-change policy early in his administration that led to the closure of two coal-fired power plants, one the Arapahoe on the Front Range, one the Cameo over on the Western Slope. For this governor, energy has been zero sum. Renewables are worthy of promotion, but traditional forms of energy, he’s treated with contempt.”

Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank based in Golden, says Ritter has managed to anger all sides: “It takes real work to piss off both businesses and unions, but somehow Bill Ritter has mastered that.”

And on energy, Caldara is just as blunt. “It’s not a new energy economy, it’s a welfare economy, and giving tax breaks and subsidies to any company is wrong. Take, for instance, doubling the renewable mandates. That is really an incredible bit of corporate welfare aimed at the manufacturer of wind power. There’s no way that Colorado’s utilities would be doing this much wind power if it wasn’t mandated.”

But Ritter has earned respect, if not outright praise, for his clean-tech initiatives from at least one traditionally conservative quarter. 

 Janice Sinden, executive director of Colorado Concern, a group of mostly Republican executives from large- and medium-sized Colorado corporations that supported Ritter in his 2006 election as well as earlier moderate political initiatives like FasTracks and Referendum C, remarked on Ritter’s promotion of a new energy economy in a way that recalls the way the governor likes to tell the story himself.

“I think that the governor kind of coined the phrase ‘new energy economy,’ which we’ve seen get legs,” Sinden said. “Even (President Barack) Obama has used that term now, and so I think it’s exciting to see interest in pursuing alternative resources.

“But I think we also need to be cautious that we don’t create unreasonable expectations about using alternative fuel sources,” Sinden said. “We’re ever an oil-dependent country, and we have to moderate our expectations. It’s a laudable goal that we’re going to reduce our use of carbon-based fuels by 2020, but we need to keep that in check constantly, to see if we can get there structurally with this economy.”

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