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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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That's what happens when the last President, along with the last Democrat presidential nominee, said that he was going to bankrupt the industry.
Yeah, just like how there's no automobile jobs now that everyone has a car.
Like hell!
Do you have any idea how BIG the install base for solar is going to get?
Right now, solar and solar + battery are at the worst it's ever going to be again.
There's, quite literally, enough first-time install base out there to keep every person currently doing it until they die of old age, with a HUGE backlog of jobs.
And while the panels eventually drop off in efficiency after 20-30 years, there will be enough retrofit work in a couple decades to keep the industry going strong for pretty much EVER.
Not to mention a bit of extra capacity planned into an install can keep an install self-sufficient for decades beyond the initial lifespan.
Another generation or two of improvements in panel construction, battery engineering (with accompanying drops in price) and management software, and we should start seeing fully-integrated solar power and solar power+solar water heating "kits" hit the market. And that's when solar is REALLY going to take off.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.
Insightful enough.
But that's just how these things work. Once upon a time, coal was king. But now it's falling. When the NatGas Frackers came through my area, they employed a lot of people for a few years. Then the wells were built, and they moved to another state.
Even if by some Executive fiat, we moved back to coal, we'd have to deal with the combined effects of automation and that the rest of the world is dropping it. So we won't get exports.
In other words, like you said, the jobs are gone.
But people tend not to think much beyond next month. When the Frackers came to the area, all you heard about was jerbs, Jerbs, JERBS! As if Fracking was the majic pill that was going to give these folks jobs for the rest of their days.
But the wells were drilled, new pipelines were laid, collctors and compressors, and the system doesn't need many people to keep it up and running - at least compared to the initial jobs.
So yeah, solar industry jobs wil probably follow a similar pattern. A huge boom, then trailing off. The days of thinking that a person is going to do one job, the same job, live in the same town in the same houhse your entire life, and not have to learn to do anything else is no longer a rational idea. Things change too quickly.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When I lived in West Virginia, coal stoves were very common (wood stoves too).
On a cold and damp bone chilling winter day, nothing warms as well as a coal stove. Coal smoke smells good too, sweet and not as acrid as wood smoke. Seriously, can you imagine someone warming themself next to a solar panel? Ha. You can't get enough electricity out of a solar panel to warm a house in cold weather, certainly not at the favorable cost/benefit ratio which coal provides.
O RLY? We had coal heat when I was a kid, and that stuff had an acrid, acidic smell that brings back bad memories when I smell coal smoke even today. Stoking, removal of the ashes - a major pain in the ass. And the reason you got to feel the heat in the morning was that unless someone got up every three hours, the fire would burn out. Or you could bank it and get cold anyhow.
My NatGas super efficient furnace doesn't require me to warm up on damp bone chilling days because I'm already there. Seems like celebrating old hand cranked cars.
Unless you were trying to be funny - then Okay, carry on..
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
More accurately, we shouldn't compare apples and oranges. The whole coal process is mature and optimized for efficiency. Solar is, comparatively, in its infancy.
If you're counting the work involved in wiring Solar panels into peoples' homes as Solar jobs,
then you should be counting the work involved in installing normal Electrical service into peoples' homes as Coal/Natgas jobs.
As I said last time, this is not a positive stat for solar. Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar. So if solar employs 2x as many people as coal, that means solar is 2 * 33% / 0.6% = 110x more labor-intensive than coal per kWh of electricity generated. If anything, this is a great argument against solar power. They need to get those labor figures way, way, way down (two orders of magnitude) if they want solar to become an economically viable (without subsidies) source of electricity.
You mean the way biofuels were the way to the future ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...
Or the way we now burn fossil fuels to include ethanol in gasoline ?
At some point solar may be the best, and when that happens there will be no stopping it, or maybe it won't. Going nuts before there is an actual advantage with power plants that don't compete on their own is stupid.
it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source
Sorry. Not even if you ignore coal's hundreds of billions annually in externalised costs.
It's not even the most abundant. There are roughly 2.4x10^19 BTUs of known coal reserves. We get that much energy from the sun every 8.25 days - just on the land surface alone, not even counting oceans.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
To be a little glib, the future of energy economics is just two things: gas and pork.
Gas for getting stuff working, and pork for all the people who are making money off of useless "renewables".
At the end of the day, every renewable is backed up by a gas plant. If the future is really without oil and coal and nuclear, as greens want, then everything will be gas.
(This post intentionally simple and glib to make a point.)
Gas got that way because y'all invested pork in gas pipelines, processing and storage infrastructure for gas. Why not pumped storage instead? That way you benefit all forms of generation, also instant start.
Okay, let's.
A 3KW solar system will run in the $5K+ range
$5K of coal is in the timezone of 725MW-hr.
New Orleans gets about 2650 hours of sunlight per year, so 20 years is 53K hours of sunlight. 3KW for 53K hours is about 160MW-hr over 20 years. 240MW-hr over 30 years.
So, $5K of solar will give you about 2/9 the energy that the same amount of coal will give you over 20 years, or 1/3 of the coal over 30 years.
And that's best case (right now), since the 5K cost for the solar is a minimum, not an average. And hurricanes (yes, you can ignore the hurricanes if you're somewhere inland, but then you probably won't have the 2650 hours of sunlight per year - Washington DC, for example, averages 2K hours, so they'd get ~75% of the return on the solar.)
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This same BS was posted a week ago here on /. It is a misleading stat as they use different rules for what counts as a solar job vs a job in coal. For instance, they count a truck drive who occasionally delivers a solar panel as a 'supported job', but they never included those types of 'supported jobs' in the coal numbers.