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Repubican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney... (Justin Sullivan)
Solyndra, the shuttered solar manufacturing plant that sits off Interstate 880 in Fremont, has become a potent political weapon in this year's presidential election. It's also a symbol of the stark choice voters face Nov. 6 -- deciding the nation's best path to energy independence.
President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney offer vastly different visions of the nation's energy future that have key implications for Silicon Valley, which has reinvented itself as a global center of clean technology.
Those visions took center stage during this week's presidential debate, the second of three.
Both candidates tout an energy strategy that relies on expanded drilling for oil and increasingly tapping the nation's abundant supply of natural gas. But, as the debate showed, the similarities end there.
Obama remains committed to a diverse energy portfolio that includes wind, solar and biofuels. He's called for the elimination of tax breaks for Big Oil, and his administration has raised fuel-efficiency standards for cars.
Romney, on the other hand, has made his opposition to tax breaks and subsidies for renewable energy a key focus of his campaign. He regularly blasts federal stimulus funding for cleantech and held a high-profile news conference outside the Solyndra plant in May. The company, which was awarded $528 million in federal loan guarantees, went from poster child of the Recovery Act to pariah when it declared
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bankruptcy in August 2011.
"It's a symbol not of success, but of failure," Romney told reporters. "I'm afraid the reason that the stimulus has been unsuccessful, that the turnaround has taken so long to occur, that the recovery has been tepid, is that the president fails to understand the basic nature of free enterprise in America."
Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area are home to scores of renewable energy start-ups, from companies working on advanced batteries for electric vehicles to software companies mining data on how consumers use electricity and can be encouraged to conserve.
The Bay Area has more than 78,000 green jobs, including 20,445 jobs in emerging cleantech industries like the smart grid, solar and fuel cells, according to a 2011 report by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. But many of the subsidies and policies designed to spur cleantech are winding down, raising questions about how renewable energy can best compete with fossil fuels going forward.