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Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

This is NOT a good thing. Producing the same amount or less with more resources is generally considered a very very bad thing. It is the definition of being less efficient..

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Since you're complaining about downvotes (which I also downvoted), I'll explain why I downvoted:

Your complaint doesn't make any sense by itself. You're assuming that they're doing the same or less with more people. I have no idea where you got that idea. Wind is growing rapidly, so the fact that they're employing more people is expected and a good thing. You can't complain about efficiency with only the numerator.

This is true, but it is annoying to tout the number of jobs as if it's a benefit, not a cost. It should be kilowatt-hours / human hour, or some measure of labor productivity if you want to show serviced, or some measure of actual output if you want to show the magnitude of the sector, or both. Giving raw number of "jobs" requires a lot of assumptions about the sector to make it into useful information.

Not to mention, the other comments in this thread do seem to be treating jobs as if they are a benefit, not a cost.

He's just being disingenuous with that statement. He isn't hold those cheering the jobs numbers to the same standard.

If you magically increased the wind industry tomorrow by a factor of 31.2 to supply the entire US electricity demand of 4369TWh, you would have to employ 3.1 million people. That's only ~4 times the size of the US employment numbers for gas/coal (and luckily this was only a thought experiment to demonstrate that you are concern trolling, real industries don't grow without massive efficiency improvements along the way).

Requiring 4X the labor to produce the same amount of energy is a big deal! Even just a million more workers would translate into $50B or more in cost, or $500/year for the average household.

OK, so apply your logic: we should never construct any new buildings, since that requires more people (during the construction period) than maintaining an existing building. Obviously this means new buildings are inherently inefficient, and only someone who was economically illiterate would want to put up a new one.

Right?

environmental impact should be taken into consideration, it's most probably a good move for future generation

Of course, but that it takes more people is a net negative. I didn't say there aren't any positives to wind power. I think it is a balanced part of an alternative energy solution. That is takes so many people resources is a worry though.

The human labor required to produce a MWh of electricity from utility-scale wind or solar plants is significantly less than the labor that went into producing it from older fossil plants. The growing employment numbers you see in solar/wind right now are mostly an artifact of rapid expansion. American coal plant construction employment is about zero right now and all you see is the operational labor; solar/wind are growing quickly and what you mostly see are the temporary construction jobs.

See e.g. my comment here (search for "Nucla"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749769

A utility scale solar farm can be more than an order of magnitude more productive per employee than an old coal plant.

So can a utility scale wind farm. MidAmerican's Wind VIII project has 40 permanent jobs and generated 3,622,316 MWh in 2016 (10.33 real annualized megawatts per employee).

https://www.midamericanenergy.com/content/pdf/wind_facts.pdf

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58883/

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58884/

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58885/

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58886/

(The EIA data for Wind VIII is spread across these sub-projects.)

Utility-scale wind and solar are also thriftier with labor than nuclear plants.

Old coal plant: 0.87 real annualized MW/full time employee (0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the fuel mining jobs)

New AP1000 reactors at Vogtle, assuming 90% capacity factor: 2.5 real MW/FTE

Desert Sunlight solar farm: 9.8 real MW/FTE

Wind VIII wind complex: 10.3 real MW/FTE

Any infrastructure project will require more people while it is being built out, and the rate of job growth will scale with the rate of build out. That isn't a negative or a worry. If the market becomes saturated, the growth will stop and a lot of the jobs will no longer be needed.

The negative of employing more people is pretty abstract if the power costs about the same for end users.

It's not if you're a politician. "Fewer jobs! More efficiency!" is a surefire way to not get elected.

Your constituents have to eat.

Downvoted for basic economic on HN as usual. Why is this site so economically illiterate?

Labor efficiency is only part of the picture.

That's the beauty of capitalism. You can just let it run its course and not worry about it. If something is less efficient, it will not be able to compete in the market for very long.

My basic idea was that when seeing this headline people don't go "more people? great!" but instead go "more people? how can we fix that?"

That is a good entrepreneurial instinct. If you or a competitor comes in and can create the same value with fewer people, then that drives consumer prices down, which is one of the end goals.

Having said that, there is nothing wrong with employing more people, as long as they are creating marginal economic value. Hiring 10 people to make $10M is better than 5 people to make $9M for a company.

Many energy sources require subsidies though.

Wind and solar are competitive with coal and natural gas without subsidies.

Regardless, there are subsidies for wind power, which may even be the cause for the "wind boom":

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/12/21/subsidies-drive-us...

Good! Fossil fuels have a 100 year head start.

Since there are also subsidies for fossil fuels, renewable subsidies are necessary just to bring the market back in line.

Yes, but in the U.S. case we don't have theoretical free markets like that. There's too complex a network of government subsidies, unequal taxes, and corporate lobbying putting many things on the market that would not survive normally. I'm not saying this is inherently bad, just that we shouldn't think we can just let things run its course and the less efficient things will be weeded out.

I would argue that if human beings and their well-being is important, a theoretical fee market system would not be ideal. Thats fine if you are willing to suffer as a result and the system is more important than you (or others) but because that will generally not be true we have to kludge it together and make the market as free as we generally can with exceptions to not ruin too many lives. Once you kludge it here and there you can start introducing kludges just for your own gain.

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