The Alliance for Business Leadership is a Bay State based non-profit public affairs community for CEOs, Investors and Entrepreneurs committed to greater social and environmental responsibility.
More than 150 founders, CEOs, and managing principals of Massachusetts companies – the vast majority of which work outside of the Bay State’s burgeoning clean tech industry but including many of the state’s fastest growing companies large and small – participate in our Alliance. And the Alliance for Business Leadership is an enthusiastic supporter of Cape Wind.
Since John Winthrop first articulated it through John Adams and then John Kennedy’s brilliant echoing of Winthrop, our Commonwealth has always strived to be a “city on a hill.” In modern parlance to be a “city on a hill” is to be a “global leader” and through centuries of innovation Massachusetts has become a global leader in the emerging global knowledge economy across sectors.
From the example of John Adam’s written constitution, to America’s first public school, first public library, first subway, the first computer, the first telephone, the first mutual fund, to mapping the human genome – fired by a bold desire to lead – Massachusetts greatest strength has been in creating innovations that scale. At the end of the national energy pipeline and challenged by a lack of commercial mining, fossil fuels or large scale hydro and tempered by often harsh weather, Massachusetts has had to innovate to lead.
Cape Wind provides another opportunity for the Bay State to innovate and lead. As university educated people the world-over come to recognize the existential challenge posed by carbon pollution and as Cape Cod itself is reshaped by climate change, Massachusetts has a chance through Cape Wind to become a global leader in renewable energy. The Bay State has become the global leader in the life sciences through shrewd choices and smartly focused work and now through similar choices and hard work the Bay State has become second only to California in the nation’s growing clean tech industry according to San Francisco’s based Clean Edge’s annual rankings.
Massachusetts now beats California in attracting venture capital for what the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (Mass CEC) scores as the state’s 4,995 clean tech firms and 72,000 clean tech workers. That is a clean tech employment base that is growing at a remarkable 11.2% annually. According to Clean Edge, Massachusetts now attracts $75.94 per capita in venture capital for clean tech compared to $58.50 per capita in California. Although the Bay State now trails California and many others as only 33rd among states in the growing market for installed wind energy.
Cape Wind presents the opportunity to extend our rapidly growing leadership in clean tech through-out the skills spectrum to industrial scale renewable energy and to wind energy in particular. As the first major wind farm in the U.S., Cape Wind provides Massachusetts the opportunity to become: (a) a major producer of energy; (b) the leader in domestically produced, stable energy that America’s strategic interests require; and, (c) the leader in a potentially huge (and certainly large) new national off-shore wind industry. An industry that is has begun to mature in Europe with more than 55 industrial off-shore wind farms operational that have prompted the employment of tens of thousands in ports around the North Sea. That off-shore wind workforce is relatively high-skill and high-paid and it is expected to grow by 170,000 over just the next seven years, according to Hannah Wood of Cape Wind, as published recently in the Cape Cod Times.
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Press release, June 06, 2013; Image: allianceforbusinessleadership