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Feds Boost Goal To 75k New Solar Power Workers By 2020
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. government has announced plans to help train 75,000 people to enter the solar workforce by 2020, including a number of veterans. The new goal is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot Initiative, which helps fund research, manufacturing and market creation. The SunShot Initiative's Solar Instructor Training Network works with 400 community colleges across the country for training, and claims to have already certified 1,000 solar instructors and nearly 30,000 students in the last five years. Ultimately, the SunShot Initiative has a goal for solar energy to reach price parity with conventional power sources in five years.
Didn't volunteer to serve The Bama? No job for you! Not. Ever.
The Republicans will do something to stop this the moment they gain the white house.
Why are they implementing all this training network and colleges for the solar industry whereas the solution for IT is "issue more visas"?
Sure OK. You try outsourcing on-site solar panel installation to India. Good luck with that.
Here we go again! Maybe we will get Superbowl commercials of dancing monkeys again, too!
It would be cheaper for the government to hire gangs of thugs to break windows nationwide and spurn the creation of 75,000 new jobs in the window glazing industry than to jack up the price of the price of electricity to the point where few remaining middle class will be forced to install solar panels to keep the lights on. Everyone poorer gets to shiver in the dark and suffer from energy rationing. According to the UN 250 KwH per year is all you really need.
Because installing solar panels doesn't require much in the way of rare intellectual skills?
Why are they implementing all this training network and colleges for the solar industry whereas the solution for IT is "issue more visas"?
Sure OK. You try outsourcing on-site solar panel installation to India. Good luck with that.
Last time I checked Indians didn't need an H1B visa to work in India.
Why are they implementing all this training network and colleges for the solar industry whereas the solution for IT is "issue more visas"?
Because in this case, there is no worker shortage to begin with.
What exactly is so special about installing solar panels? It sounds to me like pretty conventional electrical and construction work.
Even recreational marine electrical systems can be more complicated, with a mix of solar, wind, grid, generator, battery (12/24/48V) and mixed loads (native, 12v, AC).
Unless your house is also in India, they won't be able to work on it in India.
The Republicans will do something to stop this the moment they gain the white house.
Compare to the feminazis the Republicans are pussies
Them feminazis will demand that of the 75,000 jobs there must be a quota of at least 37,501 for the female gender, or they will turn Obama's life into hell
As usual.
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www.wattsupwiththat.com
There is no such thing as 'catastrophic man-made global warming', which is why they renamed it 'climate change', which means nothing of the kind.
Because installing solar panels doesn't require much in the way of rare intellectual skills?
Neither do most IT jobs.
Nor was there ever a shortage in IT.
75% of people flee STEM from poor pay and working conditions - there is a retention issue.
How many will be women?
That was the point - the practice of issuing visas for IT workers is not so that they can do the work in India
Photovoltaic is what most people think of immediately when talking about "Solar Energy", and it does hold significant promise. Government programs are overlooking a couple of really high-payback, lower cost solar technologies in the big push for electrics that deserve much more support. Passive solar design for heating and cooling has almost immediate impact in significantly reducing the energy cost of a space, not just in the extreme cases where the design is so heavily skewed into support of the solar energy that no one would want to live there, but in much more modest but effective measures to be incorporated into more conventional designs. Requiring building code standards that require all new home construction to incorporate passive technologies to provide a minimum of 25% of a building's heating and cooling load, or perhaps 30-40% in commercial structures would provide work in the design and construction technologies, as well as making a very significant reduxction in the demand on outside power generation. Solar hot water units for residential and commercial spaces can provide very significant returns, often reaching a full payback of the investment in as little as 3 to 4 years. Combined with on-demand technology for water heating drawing from a tank or reservoir of solar pre-heated water and adding only the necessary supplimental heating to achieve the desired temperature if the solar heating had not already reached the desired temperatures could supply nearly 1/3 of a household's energy demand. Putting our focus on Photovoltaic is a limited strategy that needs to be broadened to include the available, proven and effective solar energy usage that will make the difference in a timely manner.
2020 is about 40 years too late to do anything about climate change. But, this is potentially good. This means that when all economies collapse due to multiple gigantic natural disasters, there will be more solar panels to scavenge and I can find one and still play Skyrim and Red Alert 2 :D
Why are they implementing all this training network and colleges for the solar industry whereas the solution for IT is "issue more visas"?
Your cynicism is ridiculous.
The success of an energy sector should not be measured by the number of people it employs. The goal of the energy industry should be to produce boatloads of dirt-cheap energy with almost nobody working at it, so we can all go off and do something more fun with that manpower and energy.
It's quite easy to provide tons of energy jobs: we did this 1500 years ago, when almost everyone in Europe worked in the energy sector (farmers and animal handlers and woodcutters, back then). But gradually wind and water mills, coal and steam, electricity and petroleum came along, increasing the energy output of each energy sector worker, providing cheap energy and spare labor that were used a much richer, more interesting society.
Government wants cheep solar power to beat the better ways to make power. To do that they need to reduce expenses so they don't pay employees well. So not many want to spend money training for a job that dose not pay well. So the government is hoping to make tax payers foot the training bill. They got to grow solar power as much as possible before everyone realizes that climate change is not real.
IT on the other hand they really don't care about, that just makes corporations more money.
The end game is to artificially create a new domestic market to employ more Americans whose work has left the country as a direct result of outsourcing work to foreign countries. Also known as global socialism or global wealth shifting. The green movement has taken the bait hook, line and sinker, so to speak. I don't blame them; people followed Hitler, Mussolini, Kim Jong Il and Stalin.
That IS the driving force behind climate change initiatives even though the science for climate change is rapidly disappearing with the revelations of manipulated data, manipulated models; nothing less than blatant, severe tampering and falsifying of climate data on a massive scale. The climate change movement is proving itself to be the greatest hoax perpetrated, on a global scale, in the history of mankind. The real debate is now over. Real science has spoken. Factual data is now known. Period. Now we need to persecute said perpetrators and bring them to justice. Governmental, institutional and personal restitution is in order and proceedings should start as soon as possible while the crimes are still fresh.
I would guess that you would like some people to be able to recognize where to bolt the panels onto the roof, so as to not put the load where there aren't load-bearing structures, as well as all that electrical stuff that can kill someone if they touch the wrong thing...
Same reason why plumbers, electricians, HVAC workers, and vend a goat repairmen don't get offshored... it just costs too much to grab people off the boat, train them in US standards [1], then them licensed in the specific state.
Here is what I don't get: What exactly is a "solar job"?
First, there is the actual placing of PV panels. This is just physical moving of the object, dropping it into place and bolting it down, perhaps making sure the single or double-axis controller is calibrated.
Second, and this is the most important: Electrician work. PV panels, wiring to proper code, not getting high voltage across the nipples, getting power from the PV panels to the inverter or the battery charge controller (depending on if the person wants an on grid or off grid setup.)
Third is architecture and placing panels. Will the panels be too heavy for a roof, are they facing south, etc.
All these skills are not really just "solar skills", but items used from other occupations.
[1]: Since the US was the first country to go electric, the standards in place are primitive. Tesla's three-phase system helped things, and 120VAC was good for the time, but as metals and materials improved, 240VAC is a better standard overall because it allows for thinner gauge wires.
Is Elon Musk at Solar City going to hire them all?
I mean, it's great they get training; I'm not so sure training *for this specific vocation* is actually going to be that useful to them.
You are right in that their approach is backwards. Instead of focusing on trying to get workers into the industry, they need to offer incentives to actually build and install solar panels that are cost effective. Tax breaks, Grants, etc. (thoroughly vetted though).
The Feds don't train construction workers, they offer tax deductions on home. Then, the workers will follow automatically.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Solar Panel installation is grunt work. Three guys to lift the panels and one electrician to make sure they don't electrocute themselves. There is no real need for a Federal program to train people for this.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
You missed wiring up the smart inverter. Some places demand them where the solar arrays are not blindly fed into the grid, but intelligently provide the necessary power to the grid, which requires an inverter to either respond to control commands or to detect how things are.
Basically, the inverter has to determine if the voltage and current are not in sync (there is a reactance in the line and it needs to provide the necessary opposite reactance in its power), when there is too much demand (which doesn't lower the grid voltage, but rather slows down the frequency, and thus the inverter needs to basically feed all the power to the grid), as well as detecting when there's insufficient load on the grid and to stop feeding power in.
Increasingly, these micro-generation sites are used to help do a lot of local regulation of the grid because they can provide the necessary compensation and power and react far faster than other forms of generation.
And no, it's not even a "smart grid" yet (smart grids actively manage power flows amongst local generation, power plants, distribution equipment, local storage (e.g., batteries), loads, and they know exactly what all the equipment is capable of using or generating.
> The goal of the energy industry should be to produce boatloads of dirt-cheap energy with almost nobody working at it, so we can all go off and do something more fun with that manpower and energy.
I disagree. The goal of the US energy policy should be to produce boatloads of clean and safe energy, as cheaply as we can. The goal of the energy industry should be to maximize profits while abiding by the law and minimizing worker injury.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Is Elon Musk at Solar City going to hire them all?
Maybe. The Feds have absolutely no idea how many solar workers the market will require - they just pull numbers out of their asses to fool some people into thinking that they should keep their cushy jobs on the taxpayers' dimes (err, debt instruments - total unfunded debt/tax obligations are now $1.4M per worker). Almost all government estimates of future markets are wildly incorrect.
Musk may well even have a better model of workforce requirements than DoE, and he doesn't ask for the assignment of the productive labor of the unborn.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
then your point was irrelevant. The original point was Solar panels. Not IT workers.
Your IT job can be outsourced.
Your solar panel installation cannot.
That is why they are different.
That's why they are teaching people this instead of CS skills. CS is hard, it needs years of study at a high level just to reach graduate level skill. In comparison installing solar PV systems is easy, can be learnt quickly and at fairly minimal expense, so is ideal for people looking to retrain or move up from burger flipping.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The problem with the federal government funding this is that the expense will not be minimal, and in all likelihood the training will be superfluous. What will happen is gov't money will end up in the hands of proselytizing greenie professors and their employers, to provide less useful information in hundreds of hours than apprenticing 10 hours to a licensed electrician would provide.
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The number of H1B visas hasn't changed since 2005. And that's controlled by Congress, not the President.
I thought the sun would be too hot for people, even the photosphere.
They could use a similar strategy as the one Ontario's FIT used. As a home owner you pay to install solar panels. The electricity produced is put back into the grid and you receive an amount per KW produced. The return per KW is higher than the current cost of electricity but the government pays for it. This is cheaper since the program promotes the creation of new companies through demand. The requirements for FIT also made it that solar panels had to have a local manufacturing component to them (can't remember the exact details). The end result is greener energy and local solar panel manufacturing.
Point taken. My complaint is that the government is setting employment as a goal for the energy industry, but I didn't distinguish between the two.
But there shouldn't be a distinction: government energy policy should set the rules of the playing field to ensure that energy companies can only maximize profits by producing lots of dirt-cheap, clean and safe energy, so profit motive is aligned with the needs of society.