“WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN” - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 168

purchases of concentrating solar power. New Delhi imposed a host of
regulations designed to shut foreign competitors out of the market for
photovoltaic power, but it let the rest of the solar sector open. Were
India to seal of that part of the market too, the FLABEG facilities could
well close.
Governments may be particularly tempted to erect barriers that pro-
tect clean energy industries: government support for those industries
is ot en sold by promising job creation, and the best way to reassure
voters that jobs will materialize is by legally requiring that clean energy
products, among them turbine blades and solar panels, be produced
domestically . 62 Careful U.S. ef orts to open up clean energy markets
can thus pay dividends, but regardless, the prospect of being shut out
of foreign markets isn't exactly a point in clean energy's favor.
Claims that domestic demand is essential to U.S. export potential
are more complicated. Domestic demand is ot en at most tenuously
connected to the potential for capturing a big share of the global mar-
ket. Shit ing the U.S. energy system, for example, from coal-i red power
supplied by U.S. coal plants to solar power supplied by U.S. solar plants
won't generally help U.S. i rms export more. h e one possible exception
comes in cases where a base of domestic demand for new energy tech-
nologies provides a reliable foundation for U.S. companies to achieve
substantial scale, which they can then exploit in their ef orts to export
equipment and expertise. h e economic literature is ambiguous when it
comes to assessing the contribution of domestic markets to global com-
petitiveness. 63 h e potential role, though, may be one place where the
pure economic case for boosting domestic demand as part of an ef ort
to increase competitiveness is on solid, though still modest, ground.

T here is a i nal argument in favor of the economically transforma-

tive potential of clean energy, or more specii cally, clean energy
policy. We learned earlier that most economists agree that the mar-
ket alone does a poor job of promoting as much radical innovation
as society could use, and that government can potentially play an
important role in correcting this l aw. But it can be immensely dii -
cult to generate political support for the kind of government spend-
ing that's promotes innovation; simply pointing to the value of science