I think you are confusing the employees required to create a new energy infrastructure with the employees required to actually produce the energy inputs to an existing infrastructure. The latter are long term careers (until automated) while the former to a large extent go away once enough solar panels are built.
Once wind turbines are in place, they run for years with minimal labor required for maintenance. You don’t have to hire a million people to stand on the next hill and blow at them.
I’d vote for turning Nevada into a solar farm for the rest of the country.
Most solar jobs in the US have nothing to do with the actual manufacturing. We import the majority of our panels and the factories we do have are highly automated.
Most solar jobs are related to installation & maintenance (about 120K of those 200K). It’ll take decades before we come close to maxing out installations and we’ll still have about a 4% replacement rate every year just for old age.
That hydro has had all sorts of collateral effects, from devastating salmon runs to distorting regional economic balances with cheap electricity from Federally subsidized dams encouraging power hungry industrial development in the region. Imagine if Pennsylvania had an industrial policy of Federally subsidized coal plants selling super cheap electricity to lure industry? States would call foul. There’s no free lunches.
Agreed, that is a problem.
Oh dear. I may cry myself to sleep.
You might not be so flip if the factory you worked in closed and moved to a state/country with cheaper power. Or labor, or lax environmental regs, or whatever. This is the modern race to the bottom.
This is why our new EPA leaders will gut air quality programs…
But on the money saved by having cheaper energy, those coal workers could be paid to walk in circles around the wind farms, checking for gaps in the fence.
Sorry, but we can’t live in the past. The past was awful. Maybe some former coal workers won’t find jobs but they are still better off this way. Not as well off as some, but our economies have to move on.
No. Don’t underestimate this guy. He may not be a nice person but he is smart enough to get his way.
Hydro has its own problems. But it’s definitely better than turning mountains into gravel pits.
“Power hungry industrial development”, in this country, if it can be done without pumping tons more carbon into the air, is exactly what I would like more of.
I’m hoping that Elon Musk’s new solar roofing tile concept is both realistic and domestically manufacturable for exactly that reason.
Silicon solar panels don’t use rare earths and they absolutely dominate the solar market. Cadmium Telluride panels do use rare earths but only constitute about 5% of the solar panel market. They are arguably better than silicon panels but the limited availability of Telluride puts a crimp in their ability to compete. That said, with enough demand Telluride prices will rise to the point mines in other countries can become profitable despite competition from China (in other words China loses its monopoly). Niobium and Tantalum (extracted from Coltan) are not used in photovoltaics, they are primarily useful in electronics.
Followup comment
Coal, gas, and nuclear power are deliverable in most of the continental US without major cost differentials between locations. Build a plant, buy the fuel.
Renewables tend to be somewhat location specific. There’s more sunshine in some states. There’s more wind in some states. There’s no hydro at all in a whole lot of states.
So a move to renewables will produce different energy costs in different locations, and yeah, energy intensive business may relocate as a result. Businesses have been relocating for a couple of centuries now…
If coal is getting less and less economically competitive every year, then we don’t need presidential candidates saying “We are going to put coal mines and miners out of business”.
If presidential candidates don’t say things like that where they can be heard by coal miners and recently laid off coal miners, then maybe people like Trump don’t get elected.
Hydro is different in that it was publicly built, and uses a public resource, to sell cheap power to a locality. I suppose it would be different if it were built by the local govt, but it’s not. The Grand Couley Dam cost the US billions in today’s dollars to sell power at 1/2 what it costs in NJ. Imagine the hysteria today if the Feds built a $7B solar facility in the California desert to sell subsidized power just to Southern CA? And that’s not to mention the speculators who got rich when the dam watered their worthless desert land.
Likewise Trump did mention that he was considering charging us to drive on roads already paved with government monies. Managed by private road lords. I mean companies of course.
Again, where is that fucking meteor I voted for?
It didn’t get enough votes, so it passed us by.
Alternatively, it took one look at the situation it was being asked to hit and thought, “I ain’t touching that.”
Trump, Putin, and the Pipelines to Nowhere
Alex Steffen makes the case the Presidential election of 2016 was part of the global carbon coup.
