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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.
Yeah, just like how there's no automobile jobs now that everyone has a car.
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!!!
You can make a whole universe, and it fits just fine until inflation.
Bruce Perens.
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.
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.
Not really. Solar panels are becoming as tied to a construction project as roofing materials, and other basic building supplies. Even after buildings are retofitted, there are always new things coming up, new technologies that are iffish now, but are maturing (tinted windows which may run at 1/20 the wattage a normal panel, but with the sheer square footage on a south side of a building, it might be worth doing, when the price for the tint becomes that cheap.)
Solar plants will continue to expand. With HVDC transmission methods, there is a lot of desert that can be used for solar, and with roughly 3.5% transmission loss per 1000 km, this can be a viable way to provide a few GW to a city. If the transmission loss is too great, it isn't too difficult to pull CO2 from the air and make ethanol, propane, synthetic diesel (Audi has pioneered this), or something similar as a way to fuel non-electric vehicles and stay carbon negative. Heck, with enough power and a source of water, thermal depolymerization becomes possible, which is an extremely good way to dispose of plastic and have a usable resource for fuel or manufacturing.
Solar technology will only improve as well. Panels may be near maximums of energy output, but better MPPT controllers and energy storage will be the focal point eventually as the bottleneck moves from panels.
The nice thing about solar is that it is stupidly easy to set up compared to any other energy source [1], and it is relatively maintenance free, because everything is solid state on the grid, and off the grid, the only component that wears out are batteries.
[1]: A cast off car battery, a surplus panel, a $8 PWM charger from eBay, and some 12 volt light bulbs can power the lights on a detached building indefinitely. I don't know any other energy source that can sit there and do that. The Aussies go a step further and stick refrigerators with solar panels on them in the middle of nowhere so they can get a cold one even if on the back 40. I don't know any other energy source that can do that... nuclear perhaps, but with all the fear about nuclear, you will never see a basketball-sized reactor just for powering a small building.
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!
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.
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.
Coal accounts for 33% of U.S. electricity production, vs 0.6% for solar.
That is a misleading stat, since NO new coal plants are being built, while solar installations are growing rapidly.
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.
That's the wrong way to look at it. Let's take a look at how much power $100 worth of solar panels generates over 20 or 30 years vs $100 worth of coal.
I think it under represents the jobs coal creates. There's pulmonologists, oncologists, climate scientists, lobbyists, politicians...
Nullius in verba
Even if you do not believe in the negative effects of the use of coal (global warming, pollution, atmospheric radiation, etc.), you still need to keep in mind the fact that there is a finite source of that energy. If we use up all of the fuel now, we will have no energy to build alternative energy sources later.
So, it is in our best interest as a species and a nation to invest in alternative longer-term energy solutions when primary finite sources of energy are cheap and plentiful now.
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.
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"?
Strawman argument so it has no bearing. Also you might note A. Corn is the worst possible biofuel. B. All biofuels are in fact solar. C. We have pipeline and liquid fuel storage and transfer infrastructure. D. Liquid Hydrocarbons are energy dense. E. We have fuel burning devices already in use.
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.
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. . .
"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.
The difference is that people would be installing electrical with or without the existence of the coal/natgas. They would not be wiring solar panels into their homes without the solar industry, obviously.
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
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.
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.