Slashdot Mirror
Solar Energy Now Employs More Americans Than Oil, Coal and Gas Combined (computerworld.com)
Solar energy now accounts for 43% of the workers in the U.S. power-generating industry, surpassing the 22% from all workers in the coal, oil, and gas industries combined, according to new figures from the Department of Energy. Slashdot reader Lucas123 writes:
In 2016, the solar workforce in the U.S. increased by 25% to 374,000 employees, compared to 187,117 electrical generation jobs in the coal, gas and oil industries... [N]et power generation from coal sources declined by 53% between 2006 and September 2016; electricity generation from natural gas increased by 33%; and solar grew by over 5,000% -- from 508,000 megawatt hours (MWh) to just over 28 million MWh.
Solar industry created jobs at a rate 20 times faster than the national average, according to the Energy Department, while 102,000 more workers also joined the wind turbine industry last year, a 32% increase. In fact, 93% of the new power in America is now coming from solar, natural gas, and wind -- but it's building out new solar-generating capacity that's causing much of the workforce increases, according to the Energy Department. "The majority of U.S. electrical generation continues to come from fossil fuels," their report points out, adding that the latest projections show that will still be true in the year 2040.
Solar industry created jobs at a rate 20 times faster than the national average, according to the Energy Department, while 102,000 more workers also joined the wind turbine industry last year, a 32% increase. In fact, 93% of the new power in America is now coming from solar, natural gas, and wind -- but it's building out new solar-generating capacity that's causing much of the workforce increases, according to the Energy Department. "The majority of U.S. electrical generation continues to come from fossil fuels," their report points out, adding that the latest projections show that will still be true in the year 2040.
If the world is laughing at us, it's because of antiques like you who think coal is the path to the future and prosperity. While every other country moves forward, we move backwards.
The oil industry employs far more people that solar. What this article is saying is, the number of people employed in the generation of electricity from solar is bigger than the number of people employed in the generation of electricity from oil, coal and gas. Only a tiny fraction of the oil in this country is used to generate electricity.
I genuinely want to know if this is a joke comment or not. Are you really arguing in support of coal mines being allowed to dump mercury into rivers?
...is that solar energy is not only less efficient with its physical footprint, but it's allocation of human labor. Solar still provides only a small percentage of our energy output, yet uses more labor than all the other forms combined? That's called INEFFICIENCY. It's a bug, not a feature.
Of electricity generated in the U.S., solar generates just 0.6% of the total. Coal, gas, and oil generates 67% of it.
So what this stat means is that it takes 110x more people to generate each kWh of electricity with solar than with fossil fuels. If anything, this is an excellent argument for not using solar to generate electricity.
essential fragment from the report (page 28):
Proportionally, solar employment accounts for the largest share of workers in the Electric Power Generation sector. This is largely due to the construction related to the significant buildout of new solar generation capacity.
On pages 37+ there are some graphs with employment category distribution and construction and installation accounts for over 37% of solar employment (compared to less then 5% in coal and not even on graph for oil and gas.
The US Consumes ~ 5,000 mwh of power a year; this article is talking about 500mwh or about 10% of that in renewables. Of that, Hydro and Wind power make up over 90% of those renewables mwh. Solar is nowhere near competitive with those two.
The rational discussion is this. What we are doing today is using Nuclear (20%) and Coal (33%) for baseline power generation, using renewables (wind and hydro) to reduce the consumption of those, and using natural gas wells (33%) to provide peak power load. Solar panels do not produce much more energy than they take to make.
If we wanted to reduce hydrocarbon consumption today and in a serious way, we'd do a Manhattan project to figure out how to build safe nuclear plants and spend a lot of dosh on figuring out how to transport the power over long distances efficiently; e.g. figuring out how to cool underground copper wiring to near absolute zero then moving extremely high voltages over that. We'd replace that baseline power generation entirely with nuclear, and that would remove the need to burn hydrocarbons for baseline load generation. We'd have to keep the peak load plants. We would also make investments in safely cleaning up nuclear accidents, such as building robots that are capable of operating in the most irradiated environments, and use Chernobyl as a an opportunity to learn and as a testing ground. E.G. We would build the nuke plants with a containment structure over the entire site like the Sarcophagus at Chernobyl, and if an accident occurred, we'd use the melting of graphite and nuclear material as a method of containment (e.g. we'd build the entire underside of the reactor to be a neutron absorbing material). We'd then send in the robots, remove the nuclear material, then demo the structure and bury the remains in the desert. We can put distilleries near the nuclear plant and produce hydrocarbon fuels from the plant for transport along with raw electric, pulling hydrocarbons out of the air. Quite literally china could pollute all they want, and they are doing us a favor.
Instead what we get are madmen selling a carbon tax to save the world, and a bunch of morons like you who can't do basic arithmetic, use google to find out what the real 10-4 is, or think two steps ahead of your own ego. Unbelievable.
One of the biggest reasons coal mining jobs are a memory is that the management long ago figured out how much cheaper it is to just hire a handful of people to plant explosives and blow up the whole damn mountain. Who's going to make them hire people to go down into some mines instead of leaving them sitting in a rotting Appalachian cottage drinking water tainted by the slurry? That's what it would take to try to force the clock back, and then, you burn the fuel, have the coal miner's lung, the health care costs, the mercury and lead pollution, and it's going to run out anyway because it takes hundreds of millions of years in a world where fungi haven't yet evolved to consume fallen wood to make all that coal.
But of course, we can keep talking about how inefficient it is to change up a new, rapidly improving technology that's actually beating coal on purely economic costs in more and more of the world.
Damn, remember when this site loved disruptive new technologies that mess with some suit's profit margins? What's the RIAA doing these days?
The point of the article was to highlight the workforce of the respective industries; wherein solar is now the leading employer in the industry. Taking your point that solar energy is still just a small fraction of energy production in our country, would you agree that continuing to ramp up solar production and investment while divesting from coal and oil is something economically benefitial? Shouldn't it be a priority for a jobs creating president?
Yes and no. If you want your society to survive, you make sure people have a basic living in order to survive. It just so happens that in our particular flavor of late-stage capitalism, jobs are required for that.
That doesn't mean jobs are the only way to go. In fact, there's a good chance that we've reached peak jobs and the number of people who need to work to provide for all goods and services will start to shrink. That's when things start to get interesting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
very very very very expensive.
How come France can afford it for the last 40 years? Shouldn't they have gone broke by now? Instead, they're selling power.
That's because you're not liquidating hundreds of million's years worth of accumulated fossil fuel in a century or two. Even leaving alone all the side effects, that was a one-time bonanza. In the meantime, the efficiency of solar has, with a R&D budget that's miniscule in comparison with all that's gone into fossil fuels, has improved by leaps and bounds. http://www.electroschematics.c...
In fact, it's the cheapest form of energy in large swathes of the world already. http://www.popularmechanics.co...
The real problem is that renewable energy does not conform to a centralized model of concentrated wealth accumulation, so wealthy special interests are blowing a lot of smoke in your ears about it.
LOL if you think the coal jobs will ever return.
They aint coming back, ever. Due exactly to what you said, automation and alt energy sources.
Solar panels do not produce much more energy than they take to make.
I don't know where you got this information, but the best I can say is that you are way out of date.
The energy payback time for solar panels is, depending on location, between 0.4 and 1.4 years. Since the lifetime of solar arrays is usually warrantied for 30 years, they produce much more energy than they take to make.
See e.g., https://cleantechnica.com/2013...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
> He campaigned on bringing back coal-producing jobs. ... The cost of coal compared to other energy-sources, combined with automation, may prevent him from doing so.
Let's put it this way. The Southern Company (big southeast utility company), just finished their first big "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. It's clean in the sense of having the latest scrubbing tech, and the CO2 it produces will be sent down a pipeline to be injected into Gulf Coast oil wells to pump out more oil, and sequester the CO2 underground. It cost *ten times* as much per kW of capacity as utility-scale solar farms in 2016, and solar farms don't need fuel to keep running.
That's why Georgia Power, one of the Southern Co's divisions, is building 2.5 GW of solar in the next few years ( http://www.prnewswire.com/news... ). The Utility's divisions (Georgia Power, Alabama Power, etc.) are divided that way because each state regulates them differently. They are also half-owner of the Vogtle nuclear plant on the GA/SC border, which is adding two new reactors with 2.2 GW capacity.
Coal is dying. Ten years ago it supplied half of the US's electricity. Now it's down to 30%. It's mainly being replaced by Natural Gas, wind, and solar. It just takes a while to replace half the nation's electric capacity. Trump got votes by telling coal-country voters he's bring back jobs, but it ain't happening. According to the Energy Department, ~15 GW of renewable power plants are scheduled to be added in 2017, and 4.7 GW of coal plants shut down. That just continues the trend of the last decade.