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.

Comments

This is just as true as it was last week

[MobyDisk]

I remember this story from when it was posted last week.

Re:Not too surprising

[Bruce Perens]

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.

"Once stuff is installed the jobs are gone."

[Chas]

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.

Re:Well, once the panels are installed

[mlts]

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.

Not a proper count

[bugs2squash]

I think it under represents the jobs coal creates. There's pulmonologists, oncologists, climate scientists, lobbyists, politicians...

Re: Well, once the panels are installed

[ShanghaiBill]

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.