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There Are Now Twice As Many Solar Jobs As Coal Jobs In the US (vox.com)
According to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation, the solar industry now employs more than 260,000 people even though solar power provides just 1.3 percent of America's electricity. Last year, the industry accounted for one of every 50 new jobs nationwide. "Solar employs slightly more workers than natural gas, over twice as many as coal, over three times that of wind energy, and almost five times the number employed in nuclear energy," the report notes. "Only oil/petroleum has more employment (by 38%) than solar." Vox reports: This chart breaks it down by job type. The majority of solar jobs are in installation, with a median wage of $25.96 per hour. The residential market, which is the most labor-intensive, accounts for 41 percent of employment, the commercial market 28 percent, and the utility-scale market the rest. Now, mind you, comparing solar and coal is a bit unfair. Solar is growing fast from a tiny base, which means there's a lot of installation work to be done right now, whereas no one is building new coal plants in the U.S. anymore. (Quite the contrary: Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas.) So solar is in a particularly labor-intensive phase at the moment. Still, it's worth thinking through what these numbers mean. One argument you could make about these numbers is that all this employment is, in a way, inefficient. If the solar industry hopes to keep pushing costs down and become a major U.S. energy source, it will likely need to become less labor-intensive over time. But labor costs are only one way to think about the issue. There's also a political angle here. America's energy system is inextricable from policy and politics, and an industry that creates a lot of jobs is inevitably going to have more influence over that process.
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I remember this story from when it was posted last week.
Re citation needed
"Uttered in 2008, still haunting Obama" (04/05/12)
http://www.politico.com/story/...
"It’s just that it will bankrupt them"
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Context matters. He didn't declare war on coal, he declared war on carbon emissions. If anyone figures out how to burn coal cleanly and efficiently, they'd be most welcome.
If not, those hundreds of billions in external costs they've been getting away with ignoring for so long will catch up with them in some form; as a carbon tax or cap & trade or whatever, so that particular market failure will be corrected. The public is no longer willing to pay those costs - and it's a good bet that coal plants will become (even more) uneconomical, when the full costs have to be paid.
It isn't.
I was involved on the edge of one of those proposals in 1994. Putting gas burners in a boiler is a huge waste of fuel and in the long run just gutting the building and putting gas turbines in makes a vast amount more sense than all of the very difficult mucking about with water, steam, etc you have to do with a large thermal power station. Within a very short time running costs of a retrofitted plant would exceed the cost of getting gas turbines. With the idea of reusing the site we couldn't even use the existing stack because the exhaust temperature of the gas turbines would be a lot higher. In the end new turbines were placed elsewhere since selling the site made more sense than trying to reuse a small portion of a very large site, and we would get very little savings by having existing walls, roof and an antiquated switchyard.
Also I think the bit you quoted is simplistic and misleading with the source either not being entirely honest or not having a good grasp on a very major factor.
The plants are closing because they are old and nearly all of the ones closing have exceeded their design life but are kept going by increasingly expensive repairs. Parts of boilers don't cost a lot to fix since they can be done a few tubes at a time, turbine blades can be replaced a few at a time, but turbine rotors are a different story. A combination of heat and stress means they will be dangerous to use eventually with replacement as the only option (and a waiting list of years for a new one - though spares are often kept). Those old plants are going to have to be replaced entirely with something new, and since nobody wants to outlay the huge amount of capital for a large thermal power station they get replaced with stuff you can buy piecemeal instead of putting down the cash for gigawatts of capacity at once.
What of it? VC companies regularly expect about 1 in 10 companies to succeed. But more importantly, the green energy fund made a profit for the USA.
Or do you have some objection to the US government investing in the US and making a profit on the investment?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.
And once the coal is gone those jobs are gone ... and the mountain tops, hill sides trees and wildlife are gone from surface/strip mining and the water has been polluted from runoff and the air is sooty and hazy from burning the coal. Actually, I guess the out-of-work coal miners can go on to restore the environment and clean the water - assuming (a) they (and we) haven't all died off and (b) the EPA is still around to make someone clean it all up -- and the taxpayers will pay for it.
Problem solved.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Solar panels last about 20 years, then need to be replaced.
No, they are warrantied for 20 years. That means that the manufacturer thinks that most of them will last at least that long. The warranty is usually for 80% power production. Even if they fall below 80% production, they are still producing power, and don't "need" to be replaced.
it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source.
Nope. Coal is currently about $42 per ton, which is about $2 per million BTU. Gas is not only cheaper, but gas plants are also simpler and cheaper to run. Gas plants are faster to adapt to fluctuations in demand, and can even serve as "peakers". They work well in a grid with intermittent wind and solar. Coal plants can't do that. They overproduce in the troughs when they dump excess power on the grid at low prices, and they can't ramp up for the peaks to take advantage of price surges. This is why, in America, not a single coal plant is under construction or even being planned. Coal no longer makes economic sense.
then you'll have to stop supporting fossil fuels too because they'll run out eventually.
. . . so will the Sun. (grin)
Rarely mentioned, is that solar cells degrade over time, although nowhere near as much, or as quickly, as in the past. . . Eventually, they will have to be replaced as well. . .
No, the equivalent job would be connecting new coal/gas power stations to the grid, and those jobs are counted.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Since you haven't provided any links to back your data, I have to ask: is that energy value just a conversion of the raw BTUs, or into electricity delivered to end users. It's a really important difference, since most coal plants are only 25-35% efficient in creating electricity from raw heat. If you are quoting the raw energy content as heat, then I'd argue you need to discount it by a factor of 3-4x, since most coal is burned to make electricity, and PV creates electricity directly.
Here's another approach: the wholesale price for electricity is, depending on the region, something like $25-50/MWh [source]. Unfortunately, the breakdown doesn't tell us the cost for each source (coal, nuke, gas, etc.), but let's argue that it's on the low end: $25/MWh. That captures the cost not only of the fuel, but also the operating costs of the plant, profit, paying off the loans to build the plant, etc. On the other hand, a large pile of coal is pretty useless for generating electricity without all the rest of those costs, so I'd say it's fair to include them.
At $25/MWh, a $5k purchase would get you 200 MWh of electricity, which makes PV look much more favorable.