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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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the jobs are gone. Just like everything else.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
When you have an administration who effectively declared war on coal and coal producers, and shoveled billions of tax dollars in to various (mostly failed) solar companies - to launder the money - it's not a shock that there are more solar jobs.
That's what happens when the last President, along with the last Democrat presidential nominee, said that he was going to bankrupt the industry.
I always ask, how many dollars per nose.
There are *probably* more people working for fast food than in coal... There isn't any money in it though.
There is a decided benefit to investing in renewable tech vs coal and the market has basically decided (for a variety of reasons) that coal is destined to go the way of the horse buggy and solar is the investment that makes the most sense in both short and long terms.
So I guess the question comes down to : why are GOP congressmembers so keen on "picking and choosing" a market they'd like to succeed despite the obvious market forces increasingly pushing the opposite direction? And I think we know the answer : old money funding their cronyism, and the preservation of it.
I remember this story from when it was posted last week.
The solar system on my RV runs the 'fridge, so we cool our food "next to" solar panels. We heat it with clean natural gas, which warms every bit as much as we'd like it to warm, and doesn't smell, period.
Bruce Perens.
Last year was good, this one is going to be better than the one before. It's a great place to be. And for decades to come, there will be no end to the amount of untapped roofs whose homeowners could save on their electric bills from having solar panels installed.
How did you fit an entire solar system into your RV?
"Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas."
How often is it economic to do power station coal to gas conversions? Clearly you need to be near a gas pipeline. Can you just replace coal fired boilers with gas fired boilers, or is it more complicated? If instead you're using gas turbines, there is much less commonality between the old and converted power station, and less reason to convert rather than start with a green field.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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!!!
No, it's in a different phase of industry life cycle, is all.
Someone had to do it.
You can make a whole universe, and it fits just fine until inflation.
Bruce Perens.
Thats the good part of supporting great local, skilled workers. The system design if its a unique dormer home, not facing a good direction or shaded at times.
Then helping people get every solar rebate or solar tax credit in their state or federally over the years.
Later questions about upgrades to support home battery systems.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
These employment numbers are an anomaly. If they were actual sustainable job, they would be the most inefficient energy jobs on earth. Coal and natural gas account for most of US electricity, with nuclear and hydro falling in 3rd and 4th respectively. Renewables (not including hydro) account for 7% of total generation, with solar at just 0.6%. So more solar workers than coal workers sweat away open a boondoggle: producing just .6% of the power America consumes.
There would be more jobs but ideological opposition to solar meant that all the US funded research and development ended up being used for free by the Chinese to make panels to sell to us.
If Carter hadn't put solar panels on the White House and Reagan hadn't taken them down to show how politically different he was maybe they would be seen as the space age technology they are instead of something "green" to hate just to toe a party line.
For industrial-scale plants, I'm still not convinced that they will be able to replace existing generation facilities and supply the ever increasing power demands of the US. 0 power production for half the day and a bell-like curve for generation when the sun is out (under optimal conditions) just doesn't strike me as viable for large-scale power generation. Add to this the push for electric vehicles and we could see a significant increase in electrical demand in the not-so-distant future.
That's why solar thermal with a molten salt reservoir makes sense for utility-scale solar. For example, the Crescent Dunes project in Nevada can store 1.1 GWh of power which is 10 hours if it is running at full capacity (110 MW). This allows you to timeshift the power between when the sun is shining and when demand is greatest. Solar could conceivably power the entire grid with a mixture of these plants and PV plants. Not that I think it should, it's quite expensive and nuclear would be more efficient at providing baseload power but solar thermal plants are great for providing peaking capability and to help smooth out inconsistent PV and wind sources.
Enigma
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.
So the 2015 numbers are 33% coal and 0.6% solar. Or in other words, about 50 times as much coal power nationwide. Normalizing it that way, the solar industry takes 100 times as many workers to produce the same every as coal.
Now, you can argue that solar is a nascent industry and that a lot of the labor is in the build-out. But for now, this is a pretty silly (and expensive) sideshow.
So the PR says but nobody is putting up the money to build those either for the same reason as above.
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.
In a similar vein, I hypothesize that there'll be a whole lot more farming jobs once we drive "evil agribusiness" into the sea and go back to organic, cage-free subsistence farming. Every man for himself, plus a bunch of pig catchers to take the place of the cages.
You should get a heat pump and use solar to heat your RV
You can modify a chest freezer easily enough and run it to refrigerator temps for about 100wh/day. Chest freezers have much better insulation than a standard refrigerator.
My neighbor has a wood stove and somebody gave her a bag of coal to burn. I thought it smelled really good.
Being in a different phase may explain why it's more expensive, but doesn't in any way contradict the assertion that it is so.
For a semester long design project I had in university, I created a very detailed solar simulation and concluded that at below 26 /wattp, solar beat even hydro in cost. And it was a very detailed model including every known parameter (except labor which varied too much and was a one shot expense).
I think it under represents the jobs coal creates. There's pulmonologists, oncologists, climate scientists, lobbyists, politicians...
Nullius in verba
https://www.scientificamerican...
12 cents a kwh before transmission ?
Facepalm.
Nobody is putting money into coal because the risk of insane regulation is too high. You don't want to have a 40 year investment killed in year 10 because some fanatic at the EPA faked data.
As for nuclear try again one we just had one go live
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
There's 60 reactors under construction worldwide
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
The reason more nuclear isn't being built at a high rate are liability issues and nimby.
P.S. Really at least hit the wikipedia or something before you say shit like that.
I mean were you just hoping that nobody knew nuclear power plants were built ?
Given that approximately zero people are required to actually generate that 0.6% of solar power, I'd say coal is the one looking inefficient - look at all the manpower required simply to keep a coal power plant maintained and running, let alone constantly fed with coal that's been surveyed, mined, processed, and transported to the plant.
Maybe try comparing manpower needed by each to actually add a MW of capacity, instead of to generate a MWh - then you might have a comparison that doesn't look so appalling for coal. Oh, and be sure to stick to utility-scale installations too, since residential coal power isn't popular.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
WhatsApp moves decisions on the US is the profit, not the job count..
You again? So you've moved the goalposts from local to global to encompass places with planned economies.
You win your special little game!
Now can you just piss off and stop following me around while we get back to why the above poster is not getting a nuke plant in their state, the one next door or even the same continent?
Look at your own link - "planned" and "under construction" are two different things and your own link does not support your irrelevant claim. Also given the Chinese press it's best to count actual operating plants coming on line instead of claims about what might be happening somewhere.
You counted the ones starting construction in 2018 in that number as "under construction", while even the ones slated to start this year would be too much of a stretch for an honest person to include.
I know you have trouble with the calendar and thought Bush stepped down in November, but seriously this is even more ridiculous. Why bother to try something like that? It's a bit of an insult to everyone who has the misfortune to read your posts.
Start *
* Latest announced year of proposed commercial operation
It really does help to read the fiddly bits.
Matter of fact if you were clever enough to follow the links
http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
You would see the number of "PLANNED OR ON ORDER" is actually 160 nuclear reactors
That's one hell of a lot for something no one is building, according to you.
Now can you just piss off and stop following me around while we get back to why the above poster is not getting a nuke plant in their state, the one next door or even the same continent?
LOL sure go grab some facts it will be a nice change of pace. I just gave you a feed straight from the horse's mouth , you could try assimilating them.
Actually it does because it means your not comparing the same thing. This is comparing labour costs for installation versus labour costs for running an already-set-up system. That's idiotic.
If you compare legitimately you find that adding a solar deployment typically takes about 3 people. You can't DO coal that small, to add that you need a whole new plant - needing thousands of workers to complete over a period that can span decades.
Similarly you can compare post-install labour costs. For coal - well you still need prospectors to find fuel, miners to dig it up, truckers to deliver them and hundreds of workers to operate the plant.
After installing solar you need an average of ZERO labour for it's entire lifetime.
Comparing installation labour to running labour is fallacious at best.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules
Those rules aren't really about clean anything, just the removal of coal at the whim of environmentalists.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Why are you following me around?
Is your life that empty?
The U.S. has the largest coal reserves on the planet it's our cheapest and most abundant energy source.
"Most abundant energy source"? Nope. Solar energy is far more abundant and will still be here even if we (foolishly) burn every ounce of coal from the ground. The earth receives more energy in one hour from the sun than all of humanity uses in an entire year. "Cheapest"? Wrong again. Currently natural gas is cheaper in many cases at today's prices. So is on-shore wind, geothermal, and hydro. Nuclear is about equal to coal. Solar PV is competitive even without subsidies and falling fast. If you take into account the full cost of coal (including pollution) then it isn't even close to the cheapest option for power generation. Coal only seems cheap because we don't require coal plants to mitigate the full cost of the pollution (including CO2) that they produce. Yes the US has a lot of coal but the best thing we could possibly do with that is to leave most of it in the ground.
If anything we should be building more coal plants instead of trying to drop our economic growth to zero and surrender comparative advantage.
Why would we do such an idiotic thing? Natural gas plants currently make a lot more economic sense and while not clean are certainly cleaner than coal plants. Perhaps you don't care to actually be able to breathe the air? If you want to see the effects of your suggestion in real life I encourage you to go travel to China and see the results of abundant coal power. Never mind the fact that burning all that sequestered carbon is without question going to wreak havoc with the global climate. What, you thought that putting billions of tons of carbon that is currently buried into the atmosphere would come without consequence? That's a foolish and dangerous thing to believe.
Just goes to show you that anyone can compare numbers and draw conclusions---whether it makes sense or not.
Different industries. Different kinds of products (minerals versus engineered product). Sure, why not compare meaningless metrics.
"Alternative energy is always better so we should shut down everything else right now"
No, subsidizing dirty sources of energy instead of investing in clean ones is idiotic and short sighted. We're not getting rid of fossil fuels for the next several decades at minimum. But failing to invest in long term better sources of energy because they aren't cheaper today is nothing short of weapons grade stupid. Coal gets direct subsidies and worse it gets a HUGE indirect subsidy in the fact that we aren't charging the full cost of cleaning up the pollution it causes.
The point is solar and wind are wasteful and misinvestments and likely to be so for a long time yet to come.
That's not how investing in new technologies works. Nothing new is cheaper until it can get to sufficient scale. Cars were not cheaper than horses for quite a number of years after the car was invented. Email wasn't cheaper than postal mail at first. Furthermore when you take the full cost of coal (including pollution mitigation), solar and wind are cheaper TODAY - without subsidies even. They only seem more expensive because coal doesn't have to clean up after itself. When we stop allowing fossil fuels to dump endless amounts of pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere without direct economic cost, then you can come and tell me how expensive wind and solar are.
All biofuels are in fact solar.
Yes and no. Most biofuels really are just an inefficient conversion of diesel to biofuel. Solar is a necessary part of the equation but until you can get substantially more of the stored solar out of the biofuel than the cost of the diesel you put into farming it then it isn't really anything more than a conversion with no net energy gain. This is the main problem with corn generated ethanol. It's not clear that it results in more energy than the diesel fuel used to create it.
It's like that time we decided everyone had to have running water and a flush toilet in their house, instead of just using the communal well and latrine. Massive amount of labour invested to replace a perfectly good system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Flatlined but nonzero would indicate that they have as many workers ad they need in manufacturing.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Judging by the quantity of post you seem to be required to make the paint you very much with his bullshill posts.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Judging by the quantity of posts they must not be paying you very much for these bullshill posts you keep making.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Please. We dont need an uber trump. The regular one is bad enough.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
... when the government does everything it can to undercut one industry and prop up the other.
Wow. That was pathetic. i mean whatever theyre paying you, its eay too much.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
aays the oaid shill... as he reprats the loe...and mimsy were the borogoves
Or is it
aays the oaid shill
as he reprats the loe
We twa hae run about the braes,
and pou'd the gowans fine;
Hows that go at night ?
Pretty well. Last I checked batteries are still a thing and the sun is always shining on roughly half the globe at any given time. Plus it's pretty easy to move power from place to place or did you forget about those power lines we have strung up everywhere. And of course there still are nuclear plants and fossil fuel plants aren't going away in the next several decades at minimum.
Really think that will be the case over the lifetime of a power plant ?
Yes. Oh I'm sure the price of coal will fluctuate and become more competitive at times but as long as fracking remains viable, natural gas will have a price advantage over coal. Once solar and wind reach sufficient scale there really becomes little reason to continue to have this massive infrastructure to support coal as a fuel source on the scale we do today. Cheap solar = expensive coal.
And yet, it is not. We are paying less /kWh for our solar than for coal from Xcel. After 15 years, our system is fully paid for.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No, a massive amount of labor saved so that everyone doesn't have to walk to the town well and get their own water every time. Follow along. The correct analogy is replacing running water with rain barrels and manually operated wells on everyone's property instead of a centralized pumping and distribution system.
Yes, that's what they're saying. This story is about how solar isn't competitive yet.
Ultimately, the cost of any commodity is derived from it having used up peoples' time. The more jobs something requires, the more expensive it will generally be. When solar can get its total jobs per kWh to below coal's, it will finally be winning. But apparently that's still a long way off.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Your home-made PV panels manufactured by 3 people, aren't nearly as efficient as the factory-made ones that you can buy. The ones you buy had to be made by a lot of other people (far more than merely 3) but they are way better. Just make sure you don't compare your 3-person-manufactured panel's cost, with the factory-manufactured panel's energy output, or you'll accidentally misrepresent the tech's overall effectiveness.
You're right. The key is to "simply"(*) add them. The best analysis is going to comprehensively compare total man-seconds for solar to total man-seconds for coal (or nuclear, wind, etc).
(*) Some people might say that man-seconds sometimes don't compare to one another (e.g. skilled vs unskilled labor) but education itself contains many man-seconds of effort within it. This is getting to be a damn complicated spreadsheet...
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Seriously, can you imagine someone warming themself next to a solar panel?
No, but I can imagine someone warming himself next to an electric space heater.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Actually, neither analogy is in any way useful.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not necessarily. Setting aside the efficiencies of each source, local generation doesn't suffer from the same levels of transmission loss.
Have gnu, will travel.
That whooshing sound you hear isn't the loo being flushed.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>Your home-made PV panels manufactured by 3 people, aren't nearly as efficient as the factory-made ones that you can bu
The 3 people were the ones doing the installing. I wasn't counting the manufacturers - because I BET when you calculate labour for building a coal plant you don't count all the people working in the cement factory or the brickyards or the steelmills but I promise you, you will not manage to build the thing without a lot of concrete, bricks and steel. The comparison to "people working on building the plant" is "people needed to install the solar panels on your roof" - which is the vast majority of solar in the world. Part of solar's superiority is that you actually CAN economically do it on small scales, there is no economic way to do coal to power your house, even if you could - your neighbours would sue the hell out of you for destroying the neighbourhood. Solar has none of those issues.
> The key is to "simply"(*) add them.
A sum that coal cannot possibly win, just the constant labour, every day, to keep it running will exceed the combined total for solar - probably by several orders of magnitude.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
innumerate to the end
What's your going rate for being an idiot ?
It's kind of like the situation of a moth going to flame. Coal smoke may or may not smell good, but it's definitely full of carcinogens, heavy metals and other toxic shit and you should NOT be breathing it if you value your health.
A lot of it is radioactive as well.
Let us not forget the great London smog of 1952 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - largely because of coal smoke.
But it is the tragedy of people not knowing or understanding, and yes for some even caring. If the air is clean because of working to keep it clean, people will wonder why we are spending money on it. So we are poised to return to the glory days.
Meanwhile, a vision of back to the future The Cuyahoga river. A river that caught on fire more than once. This is from 1969. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Just remember,regulations kill business. So when it catches on fire again, everyone bend over and take a hundred deep breaths, and revel in it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There are different types of coal. Some smell different from others.
Also, individual senses and tastes may vary.
This has been a public service announcement.
And it makes a great dessert topping as well - try it!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If you had a system with a lot of moving parts, constant monitoring, maintenance, and upkeep like a coal-steam-to-turbine-to-power or moving-water-the-turbing-to-power or the like, then sure, guy. Sure, you're right.
Nice fucked up way to use a completely irrelevant argument against a more or less passive install-and-routinely-checkup system like solar, though. Even today's smart meters have devices that use cell towers to report status and problems so a similar system in solar can cut that routine maintenance down considerably to only when and where it is needed.
Stop shilling for centralized power despots.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Furthermore, your use of the language "centralized" versus "decentralized" speaks volumes as to the who/what your argument defends.
A better, more accurate argument uses language about distribution, not centralization.
It's distributed power that is less efficient. It needs endless miles of cable to be conducted to distant locations that might not even need it at any given time, and along the way there are endless stations and switches to balance the load to make up for this, all of which also waste power in the form of shed heat and spinning fans.
Meanwhile with independent, renewable, passive power systems such as can be had with on-site solar, you can tailor the solar on a site to that site's historical peak usage and if that site allows more square footage that can be dedicated to solar then you can produce power for other sites nearby if you feel like it.
But what you're more concerned about, and this is very plain, is where is all the energy money supposed to go once energy is more or less free thanks to renewables and on-site systems?
Every time I see people and companies dropping off the grid they are quickly chased down by people sporting backwards arguments like yours, trying to force them to still somehow pay power companies, even when they're off the grid.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
A.C. was just dropping by with the typical, dopy-ass argument of the sort used by energy companies to keep people from becoming non-customers.
It gets pretty bad in some places. I remember in Florida when people started spreading DIY (albeit pricey) methods of feeding power back into the grid and getting a return on your bill, the power companies started giving vouchers instead and those vouchers could only be cashed in at participating locations like the sports arena or mob owned restaurant. Then with the power company feeling their oats over that win, they started suggesting that companies who retool or renovate their plants to be much more energy efficient should not get to pay lower bills. Instead they'll pay the same bill as they normally would based on their historical average usage for that day of the year and anything they don't use will be given to them in the same form of vouchers. That's right around the time I left that part of Florida, between that and NASA continually screwing with the statistics of Cassini blowing up on launch and irradiating the entire coast.
Up here in Michigan there were cases I ran into just as bad. One guy had built a reservoir and was self-sustaining his own collected treated water on his own property. He heated water off some kind of biomass tank underground, and produced a lot of power from a couple of small windmills. He started looking into taking his house completely off the grid and was told he wouldn't be allowed to, that if he did his house would be condemned.
The argument was that local legislation demanded that every home's power supply (that's as complex as the language got) be routed through an approved-of meter, that approved-of meant owned and maintained by an approved-of company (energy provider company), and that the company reserved the right to come out, take readings, and charge appropriately for 'usage'.
So even if the guy kept up his argument for the right to unbridge his house from the power grid entirely, the local energy company still reserved the right - ensconced in habitat regulatory legislation - to actually come out there, read their meter measuring his own usage of his own produced power, and charge him for it as if it was theirs. Otherwise his house could be condemned for not having power "running to it".
Fuck these shills and their stupid fucking arguments and their stranglehold on the people. Fuck energy companies and all of their shills, right into the dirt.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee