“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 167

Chinese i rm specializing in hydroelectric power, for a small fraction
of what its investors had put in. Hanergy, the buyer, announced that it
would keep MiaSolé's Santa Clara-based operations in place but would
build a new and larger manufacturing plant in China. MiaSolé had faced
down the “Chinese juggernaut” that Bob Baker warned of, but the jug-
gernaut won.
Individual stories, of course, can't prove that the United States won't
gain a big overall advantage from clean energy. At er all, clean energy
enthusiasts have stories of their own. Many are particularly fond of
pointing to the information and communications technology (ICT)
revolution of the 1990s, which drove massive gains in U.S. economic
growth. Yet even though Internet technology is based largely on inno-
vations developed in the United States, the ICT sector is barely more
prominent there than in the average developed country. 61 Countries
such as Sweden, Ireland, and Israel all have far larger ICT sectors rela-
tive to their overall economies, despite having been historical laggards
in the area. Moreover, researchers i nd that the presence of a large ICT
sector has lit le consequence for national economic performance, and
there is no reason to expect energy technology will be any dif erent.
Economists have, instead, found signii cant correlations between the use
of ICT and national economic performance, much as one might expect
national economic performance to be inl uenced by how a country uses
energy.
So much for the prospect of the United States grabbing a massively
outsized share of the global clean energy market. What about the risk
that it might end up performing well short of other countries? h is
has become a worry in recent years, with concerned observers l ag-
ging foreign trade protections and subsidies that shut the United States
out of overseas clean energy markets, as well as a lack of the kind of
local regulations and incentives in the United States that would build
up domestic demand for clean energy. When I visited the FLABEG
plant outside of Pit sburgh, it was struggling because U.S. demand had
not materialized, at least in part because government policy fell short
of FLABEG's expectations. One of the few glimmers of hope for its
outlook was the prospect of shipping dozens of its seventy-pound mir-
rors halfway around the world to India, which was mandating greater