Obama illuminates the Electric City by renewing his call to support American innovation in the global clean tech race

President Obama spoke today from General Electric's headquarters in Schenectady, NY (pronounced ska'nektadi; i.e., the "Electric City") at the very spot where Thomas Edison and partners founded the General Electric company nearly 120 years ago.

"Our job is to do everything we can to ensure that businesses can take root and folks can find good jobs and America's leading the global competition that will determine our success in the 21st Century."

Despite the positive message delivered by President Obama to get America back in front of the clean energy race, the recent news of solar plant closures in Massachusetts and New York, as well as a major solar development slowdown in New York State, provides an unfortunate dose of reality on how far we still have to go, at least for solar.   

Luckily there is hope on the horizon!  For starters, Governor Cuomo's campaign platform issued in October 2010, Power New York, provided a suite of pragmatic, yet aggressiveclean energy and economic development objectives. Among them includes having a comprehensive, market-based, scaled solar development policy that can help vault New York from solar laggard to global solar leader (and gain thousands of new job opportunities too!).  To initiate this important directive, we will be working to introduce legislation in the NYS legislature in the coming weeks that will further illuminate the pathway for New York to take back the mantle as a global economic leader - only this time its the 21st Century clean energy economy that's up for grabs.