Solar Now Provides Twice as Many Jobs as the Coal Industry | Hacker News Reader

Solar Now Provides Twice as Many Jobs as the Coal Industry

fastcoexist.com

185 pointsdoener45 comments

An electrician whose company advertises it installs solar panels gets counted as a "full-time employee in the solar industry" even if installing solar panels is a minuscule part of the business -- they are a full-time employee (of the company) and the company is "in the solar industry" because installing solar panels is a service it offers.

It's equivalent to counting every housebuilder in the country as "employment in the automotive industry" because they install garage doors on some of their houses.

Solar's economic advantage is that it doesn't require many jobs. The panel on your roof just sits there producing electricity, with no need for regular shipments of coal to be transported to it by train... It shifts power production from an ongoing cost to a fairly small capital cost.

> An electrician whose company advertises it installs solar panels gets counted as a "full-time employee in the solar industry" even if installing solar panels is a minuscule part of the business -- they are a full-time employee (of the company) and the company is "in the solar industry" because installing solar panels is a service it offers.

Not saying you're wrong, but where does it state this? I didn't want to download the full report to check myself as it asks for email/name etc and so it'll have to wait until I get home. But all I could find on that was:

"Since 2010, the National Solar Jobs Census has defined solar workers as those who spend at least 50 percent of their time on solar-related work."

Which could be taken either way.

As an extension, are you saying they define "solar related work" as working > 50% of your time for any company which is any part of the solar industry? And if so, could you tell me where they state that?

My company takes the census every year (because we're in the solar industry), and it just asks if you're primarily in the solar industry. It also asks what other industries you're in and what the split is and how many of your employees do what split of work.

So it's fairly detailed.

I don't think that comparison is fair and the article reads to me like it is focused primarily on large commercial installations which would be comparable to coal power plants.

Having said that I think it would be fair to count home installations anyway. If we are talking about the job creating benefits of power generation methods then we should talk about jobs per installed Megawatt both in terms of initial roll out and ongoing maintenance.

There is no option to use coal generators at home, although I believe coal heat was not uncommon in the last century. If such a thing was common today then "residential coal boiler worker" could also be counted as part of the coal industry. Coal is not a technology that lends itself well to home installation and so there are fewer people involved in it.

One of the benefits of solar is that it can be installed on individual homes and this will necessarily employ more people to support all the individual installations.

People used to have coal burning stoves (some still do) and people delivered coal to homes. Feel free to include them in the stats for people in to coal industry.

Don't get me wrong, I want solar power to replace coal as much as possible.

But if this is accurate, I'm not sure it's a good sign for solar, since solar power provides 1.3% of US power, vs 35% for coal.

I'm sure that there are higher labor costs installing solar vs running established coal plants... but that's 70x the labor of coal.

A labor cost that high would mean that solar costs will never become competitive with coal in the open market. So I'm hoping these numbers are exaggerated or just wrong.

That's what I was thinking. It's not really a good thing if it takes a huge amount more people to generate the same amount of power.

It's tricky to compare though. Consider.

The cost of coal is mostly the cost of the raw material inputs. And coal has a significant off the books negative externalilty because of CO2 emissions and environmental destruction.

Solar which has a high labor cost component. Noting that providing jobs for large numbers of lower skilled workers is an off the books positive externality.

If you want jobs, there's an enormous amount of potential employment in converting to solar. There's likely to be two or three rounds of build-out before the panels are "good enough" and stabilize in some roughly fixed form, so there may be generations of work ahead.

At some point people will have installed capacity that only needs minor maintenance and these jobs can shift to other sectors.

In what way is employing people in an offical capacity (you pay them, withhold income tax, holiday pay, health cover, superannuation (401k or whatever you call it) off the books?

Don't these data get reported to government, and worker on academic and corporate economists? Who endeavour to account for the effects of employment in an econo-socio-politio-historic evaluation of the world.

> off the books?

It's counted as a 'cost' but over the big picture it's not.

It's like this economics teaches us that labor is a cost to be minimized. All good and well except if workers have no money they can't buy anything.

Yep. If we want to employ a lot of people producing power we should just have people ride exercise bikes.

The very premise of a great Rick and Morty episode [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/embed/l2bU_tOREos?vndel=watch&vndapp...

And Black Mirror [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

This assumes that the labor is all associated with keeping the 1.3% running at that level, as opposed to being associated with the rapid growth of solar. That's almost certainly not the case: things like sales and installation would be mostly associated with new solar (although, of course, eventually this stuff will need to be maintained and/or reinstalled).

> I'm sure that there are higher labor costs installing solar vs running established coal plants... but that's 70x the labor of coal.

So? As you mention, the labor in solar is going into construction, solar panels being almost maintenance-free once installed. If we were building a lot of new coal-fired plants, coal employment would be much higher than it is.

The relevant number is total lifetime cost per kWh, where I gather solar is getting pretty competitive.

As others have already ventured, it's an artifact of solar's rapid growth. Solar at steady state does not look very labor intensive. (I apologize if you've seen me post the analysis below before; the issue keeps coming up.)

Coal plants, particularly the older ones most at risk of closure in the US, require significantly more labor per MWh generated than cleaner sources.

Here's a recently announced coal plant closure: 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 annualized average power of 47.5 megawatts: 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.

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://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressr... ("Expected to create up to... 15 permanent jobs")

You're not doing the math right. You're comparing the cost to install capacity versus the cost of sustaining it.

How many jobs are there in the US for making coal-fired power plants?

How many jobs are there in the us for mining sunlight for use on solar panels?

The numbers are misleading because solar is on the upswing, whereas the opposite is true for coal; it takes a ton more work to increase generation than it does to slowly decline.

It's competitive right now in places with favorable sun.

How many solar jobs will persist over time? Once the market is filled, there will still need to be maintenance and replacement when systems wear out. Seems like a pretty involved model to construct, but would be interesting nonetheless.

Broad assumptions:

IF all residential structures in the US had their own solar systems:

44 million residential structures [0]

4-person crew works 4 days to install = 16 man-days

250 work days per year

30 year useful life [1]

= 2.816 million full-time jobs

Naturally, not all residential structures will go solar. And, there are many solar-related jobs besides rooftop installers.

How will a migration to solar impact the current electric utility employment? Net gain or loss?

[0] http://www.nmhc.org/Content.aspx?id=4708#Structures [1] http://energyinformative.org/lifespan-solar-panels/

You haven't even considered how the technology may evolve where it may become more efficient. The solar technology of today could be obsolete and it may be cost effective to upgrade in 10-15 years due to efficiency/cost gains.

As far as solar related jobs you have the manufacturing and delivery of solar panels, all the related industries for raw materials, etc for solar panels and then the installation. That's quite a few jobs.

Also you need to consider jobs outside the US, even the North American continent. Solar may be more expensive than other sources in the US but that's because we have an electrical grid. Solar is the most cost efficient option when considering the developing world, i.e. Africa, parts of Asia, etc. Those solar panels are more likely to come from outside the US, i.e. China, as the dollar exchange value as well as delivery might make it cost prohibitive for developing nations to purchase solar panels from the US.

I'm not so sure that solar is cheaper in the developing world. As these Indian villagers said protesting solar, "we want real electricity, not fake electricity." http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060026477

Solar micro production is insanely expensive. Nobody thinks it will scale even in places like Germany where it's merely expensive.

Grid scale solar is dirt cheap, to the point of being cheaper than coal, but it requires a grid. Not really sure what the point of them highlighting this was. If the villagers had a reliable grid connection, they wouldn't care if it was fed via solar

Solar is not a magic wand. People who couldn't afford to get hooked up to the grid for the last 36 YEARS were gifted a limited solution that cost far more than their little village could afford. The wealthy celebrated by hooking up more appliances than the system could handle and then all the recipients of all this free stuff complain that johnny can't study by the light of the silvery cfl.

When some are just plugging in a lightbulb and a phone and others are plugging in "energy-inefficient televisions and refrigerators" perhaps either the wealthier should abstain from doing so or should instead invest in more capacity.

On a larger scale this would be accomplished with meters and prices that would make using 100x more juice than your neighbor either uneconomical or at least costly enough to build infrastructure but on this scale it would have to have been solved by common sense which like electricity appears to have been scarce.

Efficiency of affordable solar cells can't increase by more than about a factor of 2 from where it is now. Even to do that, we'd have to figure out how to cheaply mass-produce multilayer cells, which are currently expensive one-offs made in labs; I'll be very surprised if that happens in 15 years.

What's more likely to happen, as I understand, is that cells of about the same efficiency level as what most people are using now, or maybe somewhat less, will get much cheaper (e.g., perovskites). But that won't be a reason to replace existing installations.

There's a startup working on cost-effective panel-scale multi-layer cpv.

http://www.zmescience.com/science/twice-efficient-residentia...

And instead of doubling of efficiencies(22% to 44%) , I've seen some thoerticak work talking about 60%+ .

By the time those 30 years are up we'll have flying robots to maintain the solar panels. Or more likely we'll have killed ourselves.

Maybe solar won't matter because the sky is always black, but hey, there's enough nuclear material floating around in the atmosphere you can generate power from the radioactive heat coming out of your air filration unit!

> "... according to a new survey from the nonprofit Solar Foundation."

You should take this with a pretty big grain of salt, because I'm pretty sure something called the Solar Foundation isn't an unbiased source.

Get those labor costs down from having to have so many presumably high-skilled workers, and it may start to be a little more competitive with coal price-wise, which is what it's all about.

Solar might already be competitive with coal [1]

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-...

According to the article, they are not highly skilled workers.

> Many of the jobs are also accessible to people who might otherwise struggle to find well-paying jobs. An entry-level worker without a degree can conceivably double their salary within a year, from $10-$12 an hour for simple manual labor to $20-$23 an hour. The median wage posted for solar installer jobs in 2016 was $26 an hour.

> from $10-$12 an hour for simple manual labor to $20-$23 an hour.

What that says to me is jobs installing solar have higher productivity than other available low skilled jobs.

Coal has already been losing to other sources, albeit not necessarily renewables. The cost of natural gas has plunged and getting coal out of the ground is more expensive than it used to be as we've already pulled out the easy to get coal.

A lot of the cost issues is about comparing wattage - solar has become way more efficient than it used to be. Coal efficiency has not changed much.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/for-cheap...

Coal is already more expensive than solar, were the subsidies provided to the coal industry removed.

Downvote me if you want but refer to page 6[0] and see that Solar beats subsidy-less Advanced Coal costs in LCOE.

[0]http://www.eia.gov/outlooks/archive/aeo15/pdf/electricity_ge...

I wonder if that's even taking into account the unacknowledged costs of petro-carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

How does subsidy-less solar match up against subsidy-less coal (honest question)?

I don't have stats for subsidy-less coal, but I'll point you to [1], which gives the unsubsidized installed price of grid-level solar (defined as >500kW) power as being about $2.30/Wdc in 2015. Page 14 has a summary graph of this parameter since 1998.

The report gives pre-incentive prices for residential (<10kW) and non-residential (<500kW) as well.

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/tracking_the_sun_ix_repo...

At utility scale unsubsidized solar is cheaper than coal kWh for kWh, albeit with the caveat that solar is not dispatchable, and the coal is not being penalized for the externalities and deaths it causes in the general population. However, except for the health damage, it's difficult to quantify the rest of the damage that coal does without lots of arguments.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Newest revision 12/2016 of that report:

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

That is the strangest analysis of energy costs I've ever seen. Things that are not accounted for in that analysis are (from pg. 1):

- capacity value vs. energy value (i.e. they're just assuming peak utilisation at all times, which is nuts)

- costs related to distributed generation, congestion costs (? land?)

- waste disposal (this includes nuclear)

- intermittency and back-up generation costs (e.g. costs of energy storage, costs of intermittent gas peaker usage)

- transmission costs (which get substantially larger in distributed and intermittent scenarios)

- environmental externalities (e.g. air pollution, resource mining etc.)

- system balancing costs (i.e. not having constant random brownouts)

- PV generation assumed to all be in US Southwest

And so on.... It's hard to draw any sensible conclusions from that analysis, given the assumptions made. They're even assuming piston engines will be used for gas and diesel plants that are sized to produce ~5000 GWh/yr. For reference, ~80% of the world's electricity is produced by steam turbines (not piston engines).

EDIT: Putting all of that aside, if they're anywhere close to the mark with these numbers then wind looks like the clear and unambiguous winner. Also very surprising that solar PV on residential rooftops is claimed to be significantly more expensive than any option... I wonder what's driving the cost?

It's difficult to get single numbers for these, due to the difficulties that you're listing. I'm not sure that it's stranger than any other analysis out there, such as EIA. I believe it's slightly more focused on where to invest if you wanted to build one more of something, which fits with Lazard's other focuses.

It's not surprising that residential PV is so expensive. First off, it's all small custom jobs which means that labor is high, which is one of the larger costs of solar. Second, residential PV is all behind the meter, so it can still be a cost win for consumers since they pay transmission costs from the utility.

Good point. From Lazard's perspective it also probably makes sense not to account for some of these things (e.g. infrastructure cost, site remediation etc.) as it's unlikely these kinds of costs will be borne by a private investor.

The article says 40 coal plants were shut down last year.

Global warming skeptics like our current president want us to stay on fossil fuels forever. They don't seem to realize the issue has already been decided, and fossil fuels are going to be increasingly replaced by renewable energy.

Does anyone really think that, fifty or a hundred years from now, our electricity will still be produced by coal and natural gas, and our cars still powered by gasoline?

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