Announcing a $3.2 billion tax credit for manufacturers of clean energy technologies last week, President Obama noted that “building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future — jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.”

It’s a comforting thought — at least a job in a solar cell production facility can’t disappear over the phone lines to a provider in Bangalore. But clean-tech manufacturing companies can still walk, taking their green jobs with them. And, chances are, many of them will do precisely that if — as must surely happen at some point — the tax and regulatory climate turns less favorable to their industry.

As I was paging through the list of recipients of the new tax break, one name jumped out at me: Vestas Blades America Inc., part of the U.S. arm of Randers, Denmark-based Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturer. Vestas was one of the biggest winners in the tax credit stakes, scoring a total of over $50 million in potential savings for its Colorado operations.

I’m sure the announcement boosted the happiness levels of the already famously cheerful Danes (see my most recent blog). No doubt the firm’s U.S. employees are cheering too, but before they get to feeling too secure in their jobs, they might want to take a look at the company’s recent history.

In 2007, Vestas shuttered a plant in Victoria, Australia, just two and a half years after opening it, claiming the Australian government’s 2 percent mandatory renewable energy target was too low, and that as a result the local market was too small to be profitable.

In April 2009, the company announced that it would close a blade factory in United Kingdom, again citing dissatisfaction with the unresponsiveness of governments at the local and national levels, and despite ongoing massive investments by the British government in sustainable energy projects, including wind. (Adding insult to injury, the announcement of the plant closure came less than 6 months after two Vestas turbines in Scotland and northern England collapsed within weeks of each other. Report and scary photo here.)

I’m not picking on the Danes here, certainly, nor on foreign corporations doing business in the United States. I’m not even picking on Vestas Wind Systems (well, not overly much, anyway). I’m just pointing out that as manufacturing jobs and plant locations become more fungible, manufacturers more mobile and more sensitive to local conditions, and tax authorities around the world more competitive, the U.S. will need to be on its best behavior to have any chance of generating the kind of job-intensive boom that the president is hoping for.

Clean-tech manufacturing shows every sign of being to the new decade what the movie industry was to the ’90s: a prima donna courted and pursued, hat in hand, by every tax jurisdiction, and only too willing to pull up stakes and run off with the latest suitor. And, as happened with the movie business, it may be only a matter of time until disenchantment sets in. ###