US Has More Solar Workers Than Coal Miners

I would expect to see large concentrated solar installations in sunbelt states though.

Those states will bend over backwards to accommodate the coal industry, but they're not going to put any programs together for the actual workers. You would need either a non-profit or a renewables industrialist (Elon?) to put a program together to train and/or relocate these workers to better jobs.

Oh, I don't know. I would think the tops of mountains that have been scraped off for coal would be good places for wind projects, or solar arrays. It would be kind of poetic.

Except it does the exact opposite. The spot price of electricity in Europe and Australia has even managed to turn negative a few times thanks mostly to solar. Did coal ever do that?

The recent oil price plunge orchestrated by the Saudis was also in part recognition of this fact (as well as an attempt to punish US Shale oil producers/Iran).

Competition never drove prices up but it sure does make the dinosaurs with disrupted business models whinge very loudly in the media and lobby furiously.

P.S. Did you know that solar kills birds? Also there are unconfirmed reports that wind turbines cause health problems.

It would be heartless to just write these people off, but it is also unfair to future generations (and even our future selves) to continue mining and combusting coal as though we aren't aware of the consequences. Perhaps a solution would be to offer employment with the renewable energy industry to coal miners, and to give those who are unable to accept a livable wage constituting a significant portion (if not all) of their coal-era wages. This might require that assistance be provided in relocating, training, etc. Probably not cheap, but this could transition us off coal while treating the miners humanely.

Ultimately we have to get off coal. Denial of this fact tends to stem from one of two viewpoints:

1) Apathy, or the sense that this is a problem for a future generation. 2) The belief that the economy of energy will regulate itself correctly, and usage of coal will decline naturally as renewable energy becomes more economically attractive due to continued technological refinement.

The problem with number 1 is that the stakes are too high. Our health, our livelihood, our economy and our provision of food and water all depend on cheap, abundant energy; it is woven into the fabric of our lives. Even a modest reduction in energy availability due to supply constraints would be devastating. The problem with number 2 is that coal, as a natural resource, is subject to the tragedy of the commons[0]. The true cost of coal is far higher than what is accounted for in a simple economic model, and humans have shown themselves to be remarkably bad at estimating this accurately.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Yes, the people presently employed in such occupations need to be taken care of. But those jobs should have gone long ago.

"Even if panel cost goes to 0, installed cost will be maybe half what it is now."

I've drawn the relationship between this and Amdahl's law, in parallel computing. As parallelization increases, it's the serial component of processing which comes to dominate. Eventually you reach a point where further parallelization yields no benefit.

I'm curious about your username. I know of animats from Carl Zimmer's article on them a ways back, and found the concepts of complexity and capabilities in evolution fascinating.

Pollution externalities are as or more important than deaths on the production side, but they are different and we shouldn't minimize the latter even if we approve of solar more than coal - it's just easy ammo to the coal lobby, and might be giving a free pass to employers who take a cavalier approach to safety.

Sorry I was away; I didn't think this would ignite such passion. It can be unintuitive how dangerous an occupation can be.

Here's some stats: http://www.deseretnews.com/top/2919/2/9-Electrical-power-lin...

Note: construction and electrical workers are in the top 10, with solar installers being members of both groups so may be hard to estimate their number. But its around 20 deaths per 100,000 per year! Add Roofer at near 40, and again solar panel installers are in this group. Compared to mining around 27.

So I admit my original comment was based on a news article, that I recall quoted solar installer at the top of their dangerous occupation list. No reference to give for that, so I withdraw my assertion.

Again, don't get me wrong: I think there's absolutely no question that our future will rely primarily on renewable and sustainable energy sources. The question to me isn't whether this will be the case, but if it will be a high-tech renewable energy infrastructure (with electricity, grids, etc.) or low-tech: farms, grains, and draught animals.

The costs of renewable energy strike me as vastly higher than most of the general public seems to think. You'll get fossil-fuel fans arguing this as a reason that renewables aren't viable. I think that's a misplaced argument of a legitimate concern: it's whether or not a technological civilization is viable.

I don't know one way or the other. I think we're skating really, really close to the edge.

Erik Lindberg's recent Resiliance / Transition Milwaukee piece, "Six Myths About Climate Change that Liberals Rarely Question", lays out most of these factors:

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-11-26/six-myths-about...

Back to that output area.

If I'm reading EIA's capacity data correctly, there are about 313 GW of installed coal generating capacity in the US. Let's double that on a basis of capacity factor, plant maintenance, and other factors.

http://www.eia.gov/electricity/capacity/

(Stealth edit: and another source confirms 557 coal plants as of 2012. http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html )

GRIST, an environmental site, allows for one square mile (640 acres) for a nominal 1 GW power plant. So we're talking about a maximum of around 600 square miles dedicated to coal plant capital itself. That's a region 24.5 miles on a side.

http://grist.org/article/2010-11-17-which-has-bigger-footpri...

And note that I'm not talking about total land-use footprint: coal storage, transport, mining, and disposal all have footprints, and they're substantial. But most of them are also pretty non-technical -- a mine, after all, is for the most part a hole in the ground, not a machine.

But of that square mile, the bulk of it isn't actually technical infrastructure. An Indian engineering report puts the main plant at 4.6% of total land area for a 5 x 800 MW plant, 92 acres. That's 43.4 MW/acre.

Which means that of the 600 square miles devoted to coal power plant siting, only 11.25 mi^2 of that is actually coal plant itself -- the rest is (mostly) much less technical land use.

http://www.cea.nic.in/reports/land_review_report.pdf

By comparison, with a nominal 1 kW/m^2 of incident sunlight, you're starting with 4 MW/acre available energy. By the time you apply PV efficiency (15%), spacing factor (55%), capacity factor (30%), and inverter efficiency, you're down to 0.09 MW/acre delivered energy. You'll need 477 acres of solar infrastructure to provide the same output as a single acre of coal plant.

GNU units is handy for calculating various factors, and we can compute how much area needs to be dedicated to an equivalent amount of solar generating capacity:

    You have: 313 GW / (1 kW/m^2 * 0.15 * 0.55 * 0.3 * 0.9)
    You want: mile^2
	    * 5425.3637
	    / 0.00018431944

(Note I've omitted considerations such as storage or other factors -- this analysis is favorable to solar power.)

There are a lot of other factors you can consider. Coal plants generally don't do well sited immediately adjacent to other land uses: agriculture, residential, commercial, or even industrial. You can park solar panels on top of pretty much anything -- they're nonrivalrous for much human activity (though they compete with ag for access to sunlight). That's not what I'm considering.

But even with that, you've got to provide:

⚫ Mounting / foundation structures.

⚫ Panels themselves.

⚫ Rectifiers.

⚫ Grid interconnects.

All of those represent installation costs.

Once installed, there is some maintenance required as well. I don't have good cost data on this, or labor requirements. But if nothing else, someone's got to move through the installation, and area means distance means time.

If you want to go further with solar power and allow for excess capacity to provide for storage, fuel synthesis (I suspect that's going to be part of the equation), and substitution for other energy uses (e.g., not just present electrical consumption), then you're talking land-use that's hundreds of miles on a side for the US alone. This would be a substantial portion of a large state (say: Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, etc.). Yes, the land use can be broken up and distributed across other states, but you simply cannot get away from the fact that it's a lot of area, and that you're parking a highly technical infrastructure on it.

And if you think this is a pessimistic analysis, try calculating land-use requirements for biofuels given per-acre productions of 30-300 gallons/acre-year for typical oil crops (corn, canola, hemp), and 6.75 billion barrels of present US annual oil consumption. There are about 409 million acres of arable land in the U.S., and 2,379 million acres total. Try it yourself with GNU units or Wolfram+Alpha.

Panels degrade at ~0.5 - 0.8% per year (for various reasons), and are considered candidates for replacement when they've deteriorate to 80% of rated capacity. See the NREL study referenced elsewhere in this thread.

I do suspect that extending the life of solar plant may well help reduce total costs.

These need to be considered or mitigated.