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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.
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 remember this story from when it was posted last week.
It's definitely over-stating to say the solar companies are "mostly failed". Solyndra failed. It was an investment in US semiconductor manufacturing, so having it fail is a shame, but some portion of investments will fail.
And unfortunately there isn't any clean coal. Unpleasant facts don't go away just because you choose not to believe them.
Bruce Perens.
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"
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.
So I'm seeing a war that never actually materialized...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I think it under represents the jobs coal creates. There's pulmonologists, oncologists, climate scientists, lobbyists, politicians...
Nullius in verba
"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.
Guess they dont have batteries over in shill land.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Sorry but its ignorant to say what you just said. The gov loaned out X amount of dollars. The gov then recieved back an amount larger than X in loan repayments. Ergo, profit. Just like any other loan with an interest rate larger than zero.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
No.
https://energy.gov/fe/how-gas-...
Opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.