NEWTON, Iowa
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Maytag left Newton, Iowa, but a maker of wind turbine blades has moved in. It has already hired about 225 workers.
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Mike Prusha, left, and Steve Jennings at a wind turbine plant in West Branch, Iowa. Acciona, a Spanish company, took over a hydraulic pump factory there.
LIKE his uncle, his grandfather and many of their neighbors, Arie Versendaal spent decades working at the Maytag factory here, turning coils of steel into washing machines.
When the plant closed last year, taking 1,800 jobs out of this town of 16,000 people, it seemed a familiar story of American industrial decline: another company town brought to its knees by the vagaries of global trade.
Except that Mr. Versendaal has a new factory job, at a plant here that makes blades for turbines that turn wind into electricity. Across the road, in the old Maytag factory, another company is building concrete towers to support the massive turbines. Together, the two plants are expected to employ nearly 700 people by early next year.
Lifes not over, Mr. Versendaal says. For 35 years, I pounded my body to the ground. Now, I feel like Im doing something beneficial for mankind and the United States. Weve got to get used to depending on ourselves instead of something else, and wind is free. The wind is blowing out there for anybody to use.
From the faded steel enclaves of Pennsylvania to the reeling auto towns of Michigan and Ohio, state and local governments are aggressively courting manufacturing companies that supply wind energy farms, solar electricity plants and factories that turn crops into diesel fuel.
This courtship has less to do with the loftiest aims of renewable energy proponents curbing greenhouse gas emissions and lessening American dependence on foreign oil and more to do with paychecks. In the face of rising unemployment, renewable energy has become a crucial source of good jobs, particularly for laid-off Rust Belt workers.
Amid a presidential election campaign now dominated by economic concerns, wind turbines and solar panels seem as ubiquitous in campaign advertisements as the American flag.
No one believes that renewable energy can fully replace what has been lost on the American factory floor, where people with no college education have traditionally been able to finance middle-class lives. Many at Maytag earned $20 an hour in addition to health benefits. Mr. Versendaal now earns about $13 an hour.
Still, its a beginning in a sector of the economy that has been marked by wrenching endings, potentially a second chance for factory work