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The rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion. At steady-state it will take fewer people

The rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion. At steady-state it will take fewer people to supply electricity from a renewable-heavy electricity system than a coal-heavy system. That's one reason that I am bullish on the long term price-competitiveness of renewable electricity but skeptical that there will be enough steady "green jobs" to offset jobs shed from legacy energy technologies. For example, the old coal plant in Nucla, Colorado is going to close by the end of 2022. http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/161009993/0/FRONTPAGE/Coal-fired-plant%E2%80%99s-closing-sends-shockwaves-in-Nucla http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099... ... the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine. ... According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs. (Since this article was published, the mine shut down. The coal plant still operates for a few more years. The MWh generated at the Nucla plant also declined sharply in 2016 and 2017.) A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressreleases/upload/Desert-Sunlight-fact-sheet.pdf https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressr... ("Expected to create up to... 15 permanent jobs") If you amortize the labor for construction over the lifetime of a solar farm, it takes up the lion's share of labor-years associated with a given facility. It's still lower per MWh than for legacy coal plants. It's also concentrated up-front. It looks like solar produces a lot of jobs if you measure while new American solar projects are booming and new American coal projects are nowhere to be seen. I don't intend any of these observations as a defense of coal or an attack on renewable energy. I am thrilled whenever low-emissions sources displace dirty fossils. But I keep writing comments like this on energy-and-jobs stories because few writers have thought much about the composition of the numbers. The gleeful articles about how many jobs we can create with renewable energy are at least missing some important caveats. The occasional conservative attack on how labor-inefficient renewables are, like https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are-a-cost-not-a-benefit-yes-even-for-renewables https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are..., likewise misunderstand the long term labor implications of more renewables than fossils.

zamalek 8y ago
> 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs [...] a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee [for renewable energy]. Another media take is that renewable energy will be costly for America (a specific perspective is that it's a Chinese conspiracy); this tidbit clearly shows that this perspective is false. If America does not commit to renewable energy it will most certainly fall behind the rest of the world where energy would be significantly cheaper, if not "free" via taxation. As a generalization: local manufacturing won't be able to compete with international competition (because international competition would have lower energy costs), so there won't be anywhere else to get work. There won't be money to import fossils (due to a lack of manufacturing exports), so there won't be fossils to generate power. To make matters worse, these two outcomes are mutually-reinforcing. We can't compete with China right now because of cheap Chinese labor, imagine how the manufacturing landscape would look with cheap Chinese energy thrown into the mix. Renewables save more blue collar jobs in the long run (but fewer energy jobs in the short-term). In the long run, there is no way to save all the energy jobs. We need to start looking for other ways to tackle the coming energy labor market crash and, apart from UBI as a pretty flawed solution, I have nothing.
- makomk 8y ago
  The main reason that renewable energy looks cheaper is that most countries chose, as a policy decision, to count the costs of dealing with its intermittent nature entirely against the non-renewables that have to fill in the gaps rather than the renewable generation. That's why Germany has wholesale electricity prices that regularly go negative thanks to green energy and some of the highest consumer electricity pricing on the planet - the renewables get the right to sell to the grid even when their power's not useful and the non-renewable have to pay for this, and then ultimately consumers have to pay when the non-renewables need to fill in for dips.
  - zamalek 8y ago
    The comparison drawn is MW/employee which is not relative to anything: it's just how much power the plant is pushing, irrespective of whether its useful as that specific time. It's a fair oracle. I purposefully stated "long run" because none of this works until energy storage is also solved (which it mostly is) or developed (which it definitely is not).

zamalek 8y ago

> 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs [...] a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee [for renewable energy]. Another media take is that renewable energy will be costly for America (a specific perspective is that it's a Chinese conspiracy); this tidbit clearly shows that this perspective is false. If America does not commit to renewable energy it will most certainly fall behind the rest of the world where energy would be significantly cheaper, if not "free" via taxation. As a generalization: local manufacturing won't be able to compete with international competition (because international competition would have lower energy costs), so there won't be anywhere else to get work. There won't be money to import fossils (due to a lack of manufacturing exports), so there won't be fossils to generate power. To make matters worse, these two outcomes are mutually-reinforcing. We can't compete with China right now because of cheap Chinese labor, imagine how the manufacturing landscape would look with cheap Chinese energy thrown into the mix. Renewables save more blue collar jobs in the long run (but fewer energy jobs in the short-term). In the long run, there is no way to save all the energy jobs. We need to start looking for other ways to tackle the coming energy labor market crash and, apart from UBI as a pretty flawed solution, I have nothing.

makomk 8y ago
The main reason that renewable energy looks cheaper is that most countries chose, as a policy decision, to count the costs of dealing with its intermittent nature entirely against the non-renewables that have to fill in the gaps rather than the renewable generation. That's why Germany has wholesale electricity prices that regularly go negative thanks to green energy and some of the highest consumer electricity pricing on the planet - the renewables get the right to sell to the grid even when their power's not useful and the non-renewable have to pay for this, and then ultimately consumers have to pay when the non-renewables need to fill in for dips.
- zamalek 8y ago
  The comparison drawn is MW/employee which is not relative to anything: it's just how much power the plant is pushing, irrespective of whether its useful as that specific time. It's a fair oracle. I purposefully stated "long run" because none of this works until energy storage is also solved (which it mostly is) or developed (which it definitely is not).