American Wind Energy Association President Denise Bode isn't particularly worried that jobs in the renewable energy sectors will be exported to China, a concern that has rattled several lawmakers, including Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.

Bode maintains that the recent announcement that a consortium of American and Chinese companies are building a $1.5 billion wind farm in Texas with turbines made in China is an "outlier." "When you actually look at what's going on in the industry, it's really the opposite. They're coming here," she said, referring to Chinese, Indian and European companies building manufacturing plants in the U.S. for renewable energy products. She said staff at AWEA is delving into the details of the Chinese-American wind project to find out more definitively, among other things, whether all parts of the turbines are actually going to be made in China.

What Bode is worried about, though, is that neither foreign nor domestic companies will continue building factories in the U.S. if Congress doesn't establish a strong Renewable Electricity Standard. "I am concerned that without a strong Renewable Electricity Standard, we're not able to capture the kind of exponential growth that we can in manufacturing," she said.

She pointed out that China, which does have an RES, is primarily building turbines to deploy in its own country, not to export. But she did acknowledge that China is "building out at a rapid pace," and warned that American companies like G.E. -- one of the U.S.'s largest manufacturers of wind projects -- could be drawn there.

"They would like to build here," she said. "But if the incentives and hard targets in other countries -- Europe and China -- are there, they'll go to where the hard targets and incentives are because they owe that to their shareholders."

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