Posted 09.01.2009

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

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Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce (and as such, the state’s most powerful economic developer), said of Ritter:
“His focus on alternative energy, new-energy economy and clean tech have indeed driven lots of attention,” Clark said. “His reputation in that space has been a great asset to us in the economic-development world.”

But when asked if the governor’s work to make Colorado a national leader in clean energy will win him votes during Ritter’s 2010 re-election bid, Clark said he had to step out of his economic-developer’s role and consider different issues. “You have to ask yourself the questions that have made people uneasy, the related issues in the tax and regulatory environment that have been generated in oil and gas.

“I think that every politician today is at risk if the economy doesn’t turn around, and that includes the governor,” Clark said. 

‘Ritter likes to tell the story of how Barack Obama used his phrase “new energy economy” during a campaign trip through Colorado in 2008. 

“We tagged it that, the ‘new energy economy,’” Ritter said from the podium of the ColoradoBiz Minority Business Breakfast in July. “I was on a plane with Barack Obama going from Grand Junction to Pueblo, and he’d given a speech in Grand Junction, and he was talking about green energy, clean energy and job creation. I said, ‘We actually call that something. We call it in Colorado the “new energy economy.”’

Obama invoked the new energy economy in Pueblo during his next speech, Ritter said. “He mentioned it and said, ‘That’s what Gov. Ritter is doing here in Pueblo.’ … He never mentioned my name again.”

Ritter’s anecdote drew a good laugh. In the same speech to minority business owners and others, Ritter said he has made the new energy economy a “hallmark” of his administration. “We put Colorado on the map as the hub of it,” he said.

Did he? Is Colorado a hub of a new industry destined to rival the success of information technology and Silicon Valley in California? A look at a record of growth so far in Colorado suggests Ritter’s claims have some substance. But the growth of a future industry around clean tech might well be out of the governor’s hands.

“Gov. Ritter’s New Energy Economy is leading Colorado forward by creating thousands of jobs, diversifying the state’s energy portfolio, and making Colorado a nationally recognized leader in the manufacturing, production and research of renewable energy,” says a list of accomplishments put out by the Governor’s Energy Office, which is part of Ritter’s administration. 

 Some people might argue – and rightfully so when it comes to legislative claims that involve more than the governor’s approval – that Ritter doth claim too much.
“Sometimes I get the idea that there is a bit of a tag-along effect,” said Clint Wheelock, managing director of Pike Research in Boulder, where several clean-tech startups and initiatives have taken root. “If he sees something going on that he likes, he shows up and makes a speech.”

That’s a political impression held by a businessman whose support the governor is campaigning to sustain, and Wheelock was not the only person interviewed for this report who said something similar. The governor’s political future will be determined by his retention of the business support he had going into his race against Republican Bob Beauprez in 2006.

Yet much of that support has already been lost, giving rise to the notion that Ritter’s hopes for re-election may rest on voters’ impression of his role championing the new energy economy and their belief in its economic viability.

“I know a lot of people who have just said ‘I’m not doing that. I made that mistake once. I’m not voting for another Democrat until Roy Romer comes back,” said one Republican who asked that his political comments about Ritter not be attributed.

Romer, a three-term Democratic governor who was also popular among Republicans, did not run for re-election in 1998 and was succeeded by Republican Bill Owens, who was term-limited.

“My sense is, when it looked like Bob Beauprez’s election was going down, I think a lot of businesses … decided to back a winning horse and backed Bill Ritter,” Caldara said. “It’s not going to happen again.”

Abound Solar is among the achievements cited on the Governor’s Energy Office list. Incorporated in January 2007, the company is a commercial spinoff of 15 years’ worth of research on solar panels by professor W. S. Sampath at nearby CSU. Spinning off such research into a profit-making business is the holy grail of academic economic development.

Abound has yet to post any profits, but its trajectory toward becoming a money-making company looks as promising as its technology. And Ritter mentions it whenever he’s talking about the new energy economy. He mentions it because Abound has created 200 new jobs to staff that new economy.

wo hundred new clean-tech jobs are not, however, the answer to Clark’s demand that Ritter and the rest of the state’s politicians turn around Colorado’s economy. Abound’s goal is to employ 400 people when it finishes its rollout, adding two more production lines to the two that already exist in the retrofitted plant on I-25. Pew Charitable Trusts, a national public-policy foundation, co-hosted the tour of Abound in June to announce that Colorado had grown clean-energy jobs twice as fast from 1998 to 2007 as other jobs in the state’s economy had grown.

In a report that looked at all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Pew ranked Colorado 15th in the nation with 17,008 clean jobs in 2007, a number that had grown 1.98 percent annually since 1998, the period covered by the Pew study. Pew counted 1,778 “clean businesses” in Colorado through 2007 and $622 million in venture capital investments over the same period.

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