I don't think this is significant. They're counting the entire solar industry against one very specific role in a specific fossil fuel industry. What about all the people working on coal plants and the related infrastructure? What about all the people working in oil & gas?
Given how such a small percentage of US energy is solar, if it required more man power than coal plants I'd take it as a sign that we're doing something seriously unsustainable in the way we do solar.
A common argument against renewable energy pushes is how it hurts the coal jobs - at least in areas like pennsylvania, kentucky, and west virginia. A "they're tryna take er jerbs" argument is a good way to get voters out against it when most people are in the industry, or have parents, siblings, inlaws, or relatives that would loose a job if that happened.
Interesting. None of those states would seem high on the list of states with great potential for renewables (too dense for wind, not enough sun or open space for solar). But if you could hack that--for instance, offer clean, less-dangerous aboveground jobs at comparable or better wages--wouldn't the workers flock to them?
The deep-pocketed, lobbying mine owners on the other hand...
Maybe the hack is for those states to get the mine owners established in the manufacturing supporting renewables. Smooth transition, ready workforce.
> Maybe the hack is for those states to get the mine owners established in the manufacturing supporting renewables. Smooth transition, ready workforce.
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.
Yeah, I don't expect the typical OSHA-ignoring mine owner to adapt to a new economy, and they probably have achieved enough regulatory capture to keep out competing tech, but state lines are porous, and labor is relatively mobile, so if opportunity beckons across state lines, economic rationality may prevail.
So states bordering coal states--the ball is in your court!
I see plenty of wind farms and rigs on the interstate transporting large turbines to Iowa and Kansas, so maybe the labor will reallocate.
I'm of the mind that we should be making an active effort to recruit coal miners into the renewable industry; there's a whole lot of wind turbines and solar capacity left to install, and those are much safer, healthy, and I'd argue better paying jobs that the coal industry.
I'm biased though, and think the coal industry should be starved of resources as quickly as possible.
> None of those states would seem high on the list of states with great potential for renewables (too dense for wind, not enough sun or open space for solar).
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.
Keep in mind that solar, kind of like electric cars, has much of its costs front loaded. Roughly speaking, you spend $20k more on an electric car, and then save $15k on fuel because its cheaper to run off electricity than gasoline. But that $20K is today and the $15k savings is over 15 years.
Similarly w/ solar panels. Return of investment is a few years. whereas marginal coal is probably very profitable, that is coal from an existing operating mine.
The real mechanism whereby solar kills jobs is by making electricity more expensive, thus making manufacturing unprofitable (sending the jobs overseas) or making the costs of manufactured goods higher (so people who need them will take money from other parts of their budget, like entertainment expenses or savings.)
It'd be a fine thing if solar really did mean fewer jobs overall: having fewer people spending time and effort making intermediate products is great for the economy.
>The real mechanism whereby solar kills jobs is by making electricity more expensive
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's a moot point because negative electricity prices reflect producing more than is necessary, the reason why it's negatively priced is because it's being generated at the wrong time (which is the stupidity of solar, it works best when there's less load)
It's easy to make negative priced electricity with coal, simply shove a tonne of coal in the burner and then try to find someone to take the load before your generators / boilers blow up.
I'm not saying coal is the future, merely that arguments about negatively priced electricity are stupid, which is why companies try to focus on baseload generation because that's where most of the generating capacity needs to be.
I strongly suspect we're going to see a shift of the power grid from demand-matching via dispatchable generation to supply-matching via dispatchable load.
High-intensity manufacturing processes, banked chilling or thermal storage, pumped and other forms of direct electrical storage, and electricity-to-fuel synthesis are all examples of dispatchable loads which can opportunistically take advantage of excess generating capacity.
Yup, however whether that's the future really depends on where you live, as they say the future is not even distributed.
In BC, 85% of our generating capacity already does both. We can match generation to load, or continue to store the kinetic energy, as long as it snows in the mountains we'll have big batteries for on demand generation or storage of electricity.
We also have some of the cheapest rates in the world.
>It's a moot point because negative electricity prices reflect producing more than is necessary, the reason why it's negatively priced is because it's being generated at the wrong time (which is the stupidity of solar, it works best when there's less load)
This is simply a new market reality that electricity consumers have not quite adapted to yet.
(Efficient) markets take care of this kind of thing. They're really good at it. It's stupid to keep pretending that they don't.
The only reason why it works in Germany and not, say, in the US is because the corporations that run the grid in the US are also producers and they are more interested in milking their monopoly than actually improving their networks.
Similar to how Comcast refuses to upgrade their networks.
What do you mean it works best when there's less load? Solar works best when the sun is shining, and that is when the demand for electricity is highest (especially in places with air conditioning).
Peak temperature lags peak solar by several hours, most energy intensive industries run 24/7, so the peak is caused often by home AC/heating which lags peak output by several hours.
>Peak temperature lags peak solar by several hours, most energy intensive industries run 24/7
Energy intensive industries were only built that way because it matches the output profile of electric grids pre-renewables. You usually had a coal or nuclear power station that delivered the same amount of electricity 24/7.
Energy intensive industries are already (in Germany at least) adapting to match their demand with the electricity spot price. There's nothing inherently that difficult about an aluminum smelter matching its highest production rates to when electricity is cheapest.
That's not really true, especially as regards aluminum.
The aluminum industry has some weird physical constraints.
Alcoa has put out some engineering-heavy white papers on what actually happens and how the price and availability of power works in that industry. I can't find them at present but they were revelatory to me.
In brief, you can't just arbitrarily turn up or down your aluminum operation. At some point the giant molten pots of aluminum freeze up and destroy your capital equipment.
Here in Germany we pay about 25 euro cents/kWH for electricity, which is about 3x the price in the U.S. 6 euro cents of this is just to pay for subsidies to wind and solar producers, i.e. we pay about as much just in subsidies as you pay for generation and delivery. Worse, this subsidy is on every kWH consumed, and only about 30% of total electricity is from renewable sources. This would be destroying German industry except that they get special low-priced electricity, so it merely reduces the living standard of everyone else.
I've been looking into that today (though solid data are hard to find). Seems that the actual generation costs are actually on par with much of Europe, but it's taxes which raise the costs significantly.
I'm in favor of raising prices of energy in general. It's not as if Germany seems to be suffering economically relative to the rest of Europe.
Sure, the spot price -that is: the wholesale price- for electricity in EU and AU might be negative, but that doesn't mean the end user pays less. Anecdote: the data centre I used to work in had a fixed kWh price for bulk electricity consumption. As far as I'm aware electricity retailers, at least in Australia, don't adjust their retail and bulk rates in accordance with the spot price. The retailers are about making money, not dispatching excess generation.
Also, very little oil is used to generate electricity. This Wikipedia article claims 5.5% of global electricity generation is from oil.[1]
Something I don't understand is why more coal and oil businesses aren't investing more in solar and wind. Perhaps they are and I'm not aware of it. Or perhaps they have a view of the market we're not privy to. BP used to manufacture solar panels, but they've wound down that operation.[2]
I'm generation source agnostic. I've read things that have made me doubt the long term viability of both solar PV and solar thermal.[3] I'm not at convinced burning coal is a good idea. Nuclear has it's problems, yet it does seem if Greenpeace got out of the way in Australia 40 years ago we could have nuclear like, say, France, and be producing one tenth the electricity related carbon emissions we do now in this country. I recently moved to Tasmania where electricity is 76%-ish hydro, but could have been higher if the Wilderness Society hadn't got in the way of the proposed Franklin River damn and hydro project, thereby halting indefinitely any new hydro electricity projects in this country. It strikes me as odd that the two strongest environmental NGOs in this country are now in a position where we can look back and, from a certain perspective, think 'Gee, that didn't really work out as intended did it.' So, ya know, I'm just confused about the whole mess. I'm fairly convinced, though, that if I keep clicking 'Like' the problem will eventually go away ;)
>Sure, the spot price -that is: the wholesale price- for electricity in EU and AU might be negative, but that doesn't mean the end user pays less.
Nope, but it's a strong sign that they will do one day in the not too distant future when we have more intelligent grids (and more intelligent electricity consumption systems).
We are already starting to see this (e.g. the other day I saw a story about an aluminum smelter matching their production to the electricity spot price in Germany).
There are countries with power grids run by monopolistic assholes, often with strong financial interests in coal/gas/oil. Like America. The uptake of renewables in those countries will be much, much slower and they will pay more for electricity in the long run because they will keep the grids configured to operate poorly with renewables.
>Also, very little oil is used to generate electricity.
Yup, because it's damned expensive. This is why electric cars often end up being cheaper in the long run despite having higher purchasing prices.
This is also why solar panels are incredibly popular in Hawaii: their power stations do run on (expensive) oil.
>Something I don't understand is why more coal and oil businesses aren't investing more in solar and wind.
Typewriter companies didn't invest in computers. Kodak decided not to pursue digital cameras. This is the norm.
Large corporations are resistant to change at the best of times. They are ultra-resistant to change when the change will cannibalize an existing, profitable line of business.
Getting off coal will kill jobs though, even if solar (and other clean energies)creates more jobs then it kills. It will still destroy coal mining towns and their families.
Yes, this is true...and it's something I struggle with. On the one hand, I think it is clear that we need to stop using coal; depending upon a resource which replenishes at a geological time scale is categorically unsustainable, as is the mounting damage we are causing to the environment. On the other hand, I recognize that dropping coal will really hurt workers and their families. "The greater good" is irrelevant to someone who doesn't know how they're going to feed their children.
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.
My read is that there are about 40,000 people "in the mines" and another 40,000 with skills that are already workable in other industries (this looks true for many of the people in the mines too).
40,000 is a lot of people (and their families make the number bigger), but it doesn't seem like a big enough number to be dominating national policy.
I believe so, though other metrics might use different criteris (hence the 80k figure vs. ~120k elsewhere).
I strongly suspect it's not the employees / workers which are directly presenting a political force so much as that they're being presented as pawns in the political battle. It's mine operators and coal-powered industry who's behind the political maneuvering. Possibly their bankers too who're about to be stuck with a bunch of worthless paper based on noneconomic or stranded assets.
I spoke to a horizontal well driller about this and he was more than happy about the prospect of a boom in solar, partly because he was interested in trying out jobs in the industry. He also had an eye on the geothermal business as he could take his existing skill-set there. Also, while coal mining may collapse, I do not see a collapse in mining happening any time soon. The biggest threat to the overall number of mining jobs is robotics, not solar.
Drilling should translate quite well to enhanced geothermal, though I've got my doubts on total potential there. See Australia's Habernero Pilot Plant (Geodynamics). The project has seen multiple setbacks and been scaled back significantly from initial expectations, while costs were well above initial estimates.
Wet-field geothermal, with live steam, is a proven and viable technology, with decades of proven use. It's still got pretty limited overall potential, though it could reach 10-20% of electricity generation needs at present rates in the US, Japan, the Philippines, New Zealand, and possibly elsewhere. In Kenya, it could provide a large portion (possibly multiples) of present generating capacity.
I don't think that's inherently true at all, it depends on the nature of the industry or company and how they're structured.
Most of the fastest growth tech companies required very little labor compared to their early extreme growth - most such companies only got bloated at the tail end of their growth, and their labor to sales ratios fell dramatically (eg Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Cisco, eBay, Google, etc).
Amazon requires less jobs per dollar of revenue generated, than Walmart (~75% less) or Target (~66% less). Amazon will likely push this to an extreme over time as they heavily automate their warehouses with robotics, doing away with at least half of their theoretically expected human labor growth.
Advertising and look-up systems online require vastly less jobs than old-fashioned white / yellow pages.
e-brokers require a lot less human labor than the old brokers used to, where you needed a human to process every trade.
Craigslist butchered the classifieds industry, drastically optimizing it.
eBay was famous for generating massive sales per employee in the first X years of existence, far beyond anything established big auction houses managed.
Microsoft practically invented the software company, and required a lot less labor per dollar of sales than just about any other company you could have compared it to at the time. They also had extreme growth. In 1980 they had the inflation adjusted equivalent of perhaps $40 million in sales with just 40 employees.
That's a subtle reframing you've done there. "Solar" is an entity unto itself, but "coal" is a submember of "fossil fuels". Apparently "solar" doesn't get the same consideration, despite being a member of the "renewable energy" industry.
What about all the people working on coal plants and the related infrastructure?
The article said "coal mining jobs", not "coal miners" specifically. Coal mining includes jobs like truck driving and the other items you're asking about.
You've basically done a double-whammy reframing: solar jobs are "generic-anything in an entire industry"; coal jobs are only the literal miners themselves, in a 'narrowed-down' field from a wider industry.
>Given how such a small percentage of US energy is solar, if it required more man power than coal plants I'd take it as a sign that we're doing something seriously unsustainable in the way we do solar.
Solar is very capital intensive - making the panels & deploying them - but operationally very, very cheap (all you have to do is give the panels a wipedown every so often).
By the time solar is a large percentage of US energy it will probably still employ a similar number of workers.
also, it is easy to forget that the steel industry is a major consumer of metallurgical coal (commonly called met coal), not as an energy source but as a raw material (coke). Producers of high quality, low sulphur coal might sell the same product to energy producers as "steam coal" or "thermal coal" as well as to steel producers. When prices for steam coal dip, it often stimulates steel production.
I have experience in coal mining, but I don't know much about the coking process, other than that the coal is partially burned. Presumably as long as we're manufacturing virgin steel some of the coal carbon is released anyhow.
and do you count the unskilled subcontractors from the building trades - when we had our roof instalation done recently a couple of guys came a few days before and put up the scafolding - are they part of the "solar industry"
On the positive side: it appears that solar energy is highly effective as an employment generator.
On the negative side: the fraction of electricity generation provided by solar vs. coal is a very small fraction, meaning that you're looking at far more workers per GWh of actual energy production.
The 8 month total generation for 2012 includes 12,346 GWh of solar PV, vs. 1,105,161 GWh for coal generation.
This means that a solar worker is responsible for 0.087 GWh of generation. A coal miner is responsible for 8.968 GWh of electricity generation.
At this rate, we'd require 32.11 million workers in solar to replace existing coal generation capacity. While that would be a strongly effective employment program, it would also be devoting a vastly larger portion of the United States' labor force to the task of energy provisioning.
That's a significant chunk of the 147.3 million total civilian workforce as of October, 2014, at 22%.
The argument about GWh/working is an interesting way to look at the world.
We need to remember that solar capacity has long life-span (say ~25 years minimum) per panel. Where coal needs to be constantly mined and burned.
If you multiple 0.087*25 years of operation you get 2.175GWh/worker in solar.
Now, there are an almost endless numbers of adjustments you can make to this calculation. And you really need to use the "newly installed capacity/year" number when multiplying by the lifespan of the panels.
I think the calculation is more complicated than you make it seem. And it's not surprising that the cost to install a long-life span technology is relatively high (in terms of man-power) as solar is in its infancy.
(I say infancy b/c I believe we'll be far more efficient at making and installing solar cells 30 years from now than we are today. I expect coal mining to make smaller efficiency gains.)
Finally, jobs are a great thing. YC put out a RFS looking for ~1million new jobs:
https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/#million
I'd love to see them created in solar.
Panel lifetime is generally given as a nominal 20-25 years. That's not a minimum. The reason is a gradual degradation, mean of 0.8%, median 0.5% of output per year, due to multiple causes. See: "Photovoltaic Degradation Rates: An Analytical Review", Dirk C. Jordan and Sarah R. Kurtz, NREL
I would like to know how the employment numbers here are calculated, and how they're allocated across the lifetime of solar plant. I'm not trying to knock solar, I'm showing that it's quite possible to have too much of a good thing though.
CleanTechnica is generally a pretty reliable source. US EIA gives 3.2 GW nameplate capacity for solar as of 2012: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_03.html Installations have been going at a major clip, so 4.8 GW sounds highly plausible.
"I think the calculation is more complicated than you make it seem."
It almost certainly is. However my point was that it's also a bit less straightforward than the BusinessInsider piece presents. Believe me, I'd like to see good jobs in the solar sector. But I'd really like for those to be productive jobs.
I do think that solar will continue to see cost reductions (and those will be key to its success). Addressing factors other than just efficiency (mostly overrated), and in particular, the installation, durability, and maintenance costs, are what I suspect are key.
Jobs ... are complicated. My point isn't so much that they're good or bad, more that if the trends reported are projected forward, we'll see a very large portion of the labor force directly employed in energy harvesting. This isn't the end of the world, but it does mean that roughly 1 in 5 present jobs will be supersceded. There was an earlier time when energy harvesting occupied a similar or larger portion of the workforce, though it was called "farming" at the time. In some countries it still comprises 90% or more of all work.
This plays into another discussion -- that of EROEI and what levels of it are required to support various levels of economic and technological complexity.
The starting numbers are nonsense though. It is people who work in any aspect of solar for at least half their work time vs people who directly mine coal, but not people who work in any aspect of coal for half their work time. Coal is pretty useless if you do not transport it or build machines to burn it in.
Isn't the largest labor input for solar in manufacturing and installation, rather than maintenance? Using your example of 12,346 GWh of solar PV for 2012, wouldn't those solar installations have produced the same amount of power (or close to it) in 2013 without any additional labor input, plus whatever new capacity was installed in 2013, resulting a higher GWh:worker ratio?
Home solar installation costs are too high. Rocky Mountain Institute, 2011: "Total soft costs—including customer acquisition; installation labor; permitting, inspection, and interconnection (PII); and margin and other associated costs—now make up approximately 70% of the total installed priced for a U.S. residential PV system."
Australia and Germany have lower costs per KW installed, but the installation cost exceeds panel cost even there. This is a big problem. Even if panel cost goes to 0, installed cost will be maybe half what it is now.
Solar panels which are also roof components have been suggested for new construction, but that requires more roof design standardization than the housing industry is used to.
There are also "off-roof electrical costs". A solar installation usually requires a new meter box and additional boxes for inverters, control gear, and disconnects. Standardizing how solar systems connect at the meter box would simplify that.
The norm in Australia is now a one-day install. The US and Germany run slower, partly because more waterproofing is required. ("Every hole in the roof is a dagger through the heart of a house")
Good data, and yes, RMI have done some studies on this.
"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.
a) if we did this, you can bet on vastly improved automation and efficiencies, and much larger plants. Solar jobs are vastly dominated by rooftop installation, which isn't at all what you'd get if you were powering a whole nation.
b) After the solar output is built, you don't need to add much more, and maintenance is much less than the construction labor. You might need only 2 - 10 % of your estimate -- just adding solar at the electric grid replacement rate. Still, that's a lot of labor.
We've got a lot of building out of solar capacity to do, though with rates of growth, it could be a majority (not "significant", but "majority") component of electrical generation in a decade or so. High growth rates from a low base tend not to be sustained though. Regardless, we'll be building out infrastructure for a while.
Once built, solar will need replacement at ~5% of installed base per year (based on a 20% lifespan).
Yes, large-installation construction should be less expensive than rooftop retrofitting. I also suspect we'll see increasing amounts of integrated solar construction.
As I note elsewhere, I haven't seen a good allocation of labor by phase of solar deployment (e.g., new rollouts, maintenance, ongoing replacement, support and administrative positions, recycling).
Oh, and at some point, recycling of decommissioned panels will also be a thing.
Besides being a bad metric (solar installations have fixed up-front costs, with long lifespans)...
High labor costs per unit of energy is a good thing. Coal mining is resource intensive, and a significant portion of your energy dollar is going into paying for the cost of mining and transport. If a kWh of solar costs the same as a kWh of coal, all things equal, it is better for society for that cost to be spread among many well paid, middle class laborers.
All else being equal, you do want to minimize your input costs, labor, capital, raw materials, and otherwise, in whatever activities you're engaged in.
The fact that fossil fuels allow for a huge avoided cost (that of the prehistoric accumulation of sunlight and transformation into fuels) doesn't make low labor costs inherently bad.
I'm wrapping my head around various bits of the labor / wage equity question, but on balance I suspect it's largely independent of cost inputs to basic resources, including energy, which would mean that you're confounding two unrelated issues.
The goal should be to have sufficient accessible well-paying jobs. Not for them to necessarily be in low-productivity, but nonetheless essential, energy harvesting positions.
Also you're basically comparing sales when margin should be the metric.
8.968GWh of "sales" , but how much of that is spent mining it? And cleaning up after it w/ the pollution from burning, the damage to the environment etc etc?
Same story for Solar too, i know there is impact, but I would venture that the "costs" are much less, so to speak.
The proper metric is net delivered energy. Generation is a reasonable proxy for that, though EROEI would give you a better measure.
The EROEI of coal is typically very high -- 1:100 to 1:200 or better, vs. 1:6 to 1:20 for solar PV (estimates vary, and are dependent on specifics).
Regardless, if you're looking at delivered energy and divide by labor, you end up with the values I've shown. I haven't seen the case presented this way previously and feel it helps illuminate the situation.
From what I can tell, solar doesn't contribute a significant amount of electricity. About 0.25%. Coal is about 40%. I think we're comparing the wrong thing.
Yes, the absolute share is still very small. It's growing quite rapidly though. As of last January, the doubling rate was 7.5 months.
Very rapid growth from a small base is not the sort of behavior that's likely to continue long, but at that rate, of growth, solar power would be a majority component of U.S. generating capacity in only 8 years.
I suspect it'll take somewhat longer than that, but there's no question the sector's expanding tremendously.
It sounds like you understand what you're saying is bs, but then you continue to say it anyway. We both know that it's not going to follow a "Moore's Doubling Law". Can anyone take a realistic deeper look into what the possibilities of solar are over the next decade?
There are a number of places you can find such research.
The US EIA (Energy Information Administration), part of the Department of Energy, regularly posts forecasts. http://www.eia.gov/
There is research published by the National Research Labs (also part of DOE), particularly the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado, NREL. See their Renewable Electricity Futures Study:
http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re_futures/
The Electric Power Research Institute, EPRI, an industry research organization.
http://epri.com/
Various large utilities, particularly in the Western US, post forecasts. See especially PG&E and Southern California Edison.
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) are among the private research organizations looking at renewables and future projections.
http://www.rmi.org/
Cleantechnica seems to be a pretty good online renewable energy source, without much of the fluff that infects the sector.
Internationally, the International Energy Agency (IEA), as well as various government organizations, particularly the European Commission. CSIRO is an Australian research organization comparable to the US National Labs.
The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has an impressively comprehensive report on renewable energy technologies:
http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/
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.
Given that solar is less than 1% of global energy production and installed capacity, you can still calculate the absolute numbers. Additionally, roof mounted solar is a very (very, very, very) small fraction of total installed solar capacity as the majority is ground mounted i.e. the large >500kw plants. Having started my career in energy this "roof" argument only pops up when talking to non-energy folks, as the real meat (installed capacity) is in remote, high radiation locations, far away from what people understand by solar (roof).
I believe all that. Still, its more per-megawatt calculating. Are large farms installed using automated processes (large prefab panels, cranes etc)? Then the per-worker death rates may be significantly affected by the roofers, who are likely numerous.
Feel free to share global coal mining and coal plant construction death numbers with all of us... that previous link (with lack of sources) doesn't talk about global solar installation, nor global coal mining (as the US has been a net importer of coal for decades) it's wishful thinking not to count mining accidents from imported coal, isn't it?
What you can't do is compare part of one value chain (just coal plant construction) which is 100% reliant on coal mining, and later compare it to solar which is then 100% operational. But feel free to compare apples and oranges, it just shows the value of your argument.
I'm sure coal mining + power plants accidents/deaths is orders of magnitude larger than all solar technologies.
I did share (above); for mining its around 27/10,000/year. Which is commensurate with solar installation/construction/electrical. And roofing (for those in solar that do work on roofs) is near 40.
And yes, this is probably a red herring, since rooftop solar is bound to recede into insignificance and solar farms continue to grow in generation capacity.
Also, its weird to compare solar installation with coal mining (instead of for instance coal plant construction).
That story seems to add the deaths attributable to coal consumption (through people dying from breathing polluted air) rather than the deaths from coal extraction vs. solar installation, which is what the poster above was talking about before getting flagged (perhaps due to the failure to back the statement up with any data).
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.
This is apples and oranges. They're comparing coal miners to people who are primarily engaged in building or installing solar panels. If you want a true comparison along those lines, you'd need to account for every person working at a coal-fired power plant or working on a coal-based power source (like antique trains).
While I'm generally pro-solar, more workers is not an inherent good with an energy source... quite the opposite. The idea of energy is to require as few workers as possible so that human attention and labor can be spent on other things.
This is likely directly related to the fact that coal has a higher EROEI than solar (neglecting long-term externalities of course).
>While I'm generally pro-solar, more workers is not an inherent good with an energy source... quite the opposite. The idea of energy is to require as few workers as possible so that human attention and labor can be spent on other things.
Because the country has a massive overemployment problem right now?
For every square meter of PV deployed, you start with 1 kW of incident sunlight, reduced by the panel efficiency (~15%), capacity factor (~25%), the shading/spacing factor (~55%), and inverter efficiency (~90%). Your panels have a nominal life of 20 years after which they must be replaced.
On a square-meter basis, the raw output of a coal-fired plant is vastly higher. That footprint is extended by mining operations, fuel transport (mostly railroad), and tailings and ash disposal. It's still pretty high.
That said, I'd prefer to see approaches to increasing solar worker efficiency rather than prolonging use of coal.
I don't see why a power output per square meter metric would be worth comparing. The amount of space solar takes up shouldn't really matter that much.
I do believe that solar farms are a pretty bad idea and panels should be put on roof tops more than anywhere else. Roof top solar solves more problems than farms. It helps keep roofs cooler during summer which can help reduce the heat island effect. It also doesn't take up space that is becoming more precious all of the time.
Because that square meter represents capital infrastructure which must be built, maintained, integrated into the grid (inverters, transmission lines), and eventually replaced and updated.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
That is: we'd need 5,425 square miles, or a region 73 miles on a side.
(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.
Hmmm, I still don't think that is a valid metric to measure both by. There are too many variables and analogies to make it a good comparison. There is a huuuuugggeee variable you didn't even talk about which is the electric grid. Huge amounts of land is taken up for this and it is very expensive to maintain. One of the reasons I want solar is because where I live (midwest US) falling trees/branches during wind storms and snow storms causes lots of down time.
I could go on about other things, but I still think comparing the land use of both of them is fairly ridiculous.
You've got long-distance transmission. The issue here isn't the power losses (actually fairly low and constant at about 6%), but the per-mile costs: $1m - $2m. Even on linear distance, that's not too bad, but if you're creating a situation where you've got to have high-capacity transmission all over the place (areal, not lineal density), it starts adding up. That's one of the costs the Solar Fucking Idiot Roadways people failed to take into account.
There are interconnects -- basically inverters and busses which feed back into the grid. I don't have a lot of details on this, but you're basically allocating some of this per specific facility of installed solar.
And then there's grid management. The issue with solar is that it's variable. That doesn't mean "unpredictable", as you actually can predict with very high accuracy 24-72 hours in advance (long enough to take actions) what your supply and demand will be. I've been commenting recently on G+ about the German Fraunhoffer Institute's solar energy who discusses high and low cost points for per MWh electrical costs. There were several of these in 2014, each tied to specific forecasting misses. Generally, either renewable power sources were over or under estimated, or demand was.
Storage, demand-side management, and other options might impose various costs of their own though.
Solar panals also use their land area much less invasivly. You can stick them on the roofs of building which would otherwise be unused space. Coal power plants do not share space nearly as well. Of course, coal mining may actually make more usable space but I would prefer to keep such space in its natural state until we actually want to use it.
Right. That's a concern for land use which I address in another follow-up on this thread. What I'm focusing on though are the costs of plant capital involved in energy production, and the relative productivity of that capital. Coal plants approach 500x the energy intensity of solar power.
Isn't 20 years considered the bare minimum for solar panels (with a good warranty lasting that long)? They sure as hell aren't useless automatically around that point- the peak output has certainly degraded but not to the point where you couldn't easily continue using them for 5, 10, or even 20+ more years.
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.
Omni's point is that they are "considered candidates for replacement" by companies with a vested interest in selling you replacements.
I'm sure that car makers consider a 3 year old car a "candidate for replacement" as well. Doesn't make it worthless or not worthy of continuing to run rather than investing in replacing...
Panel replacement also seems to be a constant concern in these discussions, implying that mining equipment is free and indestructible, and that coal plants never need retirement or refurb.
Coal mines are typically controlled-access sites. Also frequently not located in residential / commercial areas. Which cuts down on theft.
Most of the equipment used in mining is, of necessity, pretty heavy-duty.
PV panels are constructed of silicon, glass, and electronics. None of which are particularly known for being as rugged as, say, 3/8" steel plate.
There's also a lot of it, it is and has to be exposed to open air. Find yourself in a high-wind situation -- storm gusts of 40 - 80 MPH aren't uncommon, tornado or hurricane conditions can see wind speeds of 100 - 500 MPH.
Yes, as a matter of fact, things get damaged from time to time.
Add to that the fact that you've got from thousands to tens of thousands of square miles of deployed infrastructure, and security also becomes a significant issue. There are copper thieves as things stand now. A rooftop full of PV can be several tens of thousands of dollars of capital.
I have a startup in solar, and the thing I don't think people are understanding here is the unbelievable amount of growth that is starting to happen in solar. We're talking 400x growth in the next 40 years[1].
So far, the solar industry has reached grid parity (i.e. unsubsidized costs <= retail cost from the grid) in a few U.S. states and several countries[2]. When it has reached grid parity in these locations, you see a huge inflow of investment capital since there's little regulatory risk[3].
This trend will not change. Solar will only get cheaper, and fossil fuels will only get more expensive. So what happens in 10-20 years when solar is at or below grid parity in most of the world? Mix that financial advantage with a huge political movement to fight climate change (e.g. stop Colorado from burning down every other year), and you have the formula for another whale oil-style shift in energy.
I'm originally a chemical engineer from Texas, and I have a standing $100 bet with two of my friends who work in the petroleum industry that they will not retire in an oil job. Anyone else want to take that bet?
I'd like to know your thoughts on today's cheap oil prices-- assuming oil stays around $70-80 a barrel for the next few years, do you see that slowing down solar development/investment? In other words, do people keep their "eyes on the prize" so to speak, or are they dissuaded by temporarily cheap oil prices?
It's actually kind of interesting. I think it might be helpful globally for clean energy. Cheap oil means people won't feel as much pain if a carbon tax is put in place to compensate for the externalities of using fossil fuels. So this is an opportunity for political movements in countries to push through a carbon tax now. Then when the price of oil goes back up (i.e. after OPEC has driven out the frackers and hurt Russia sufficiently), the carbon tax will make clean energy more competitive. I personally think that OPEC is shooting themselves in the foot over the long term with this move.
For many of the smaller scale oil extraction companies (in the US), they've actually suspended production because of the cheap prices. Hydraulic Fracturing is a very expensive procedure right now and the low prices are hitting the point where the costs of extraction don't pull enough revenue to get the profits the companies need to survive.
Oil has a sweet spot. Too expensive it can't compete with solar and other green energies. Too cheap and it can't be extracted at a profit.
As green energies push down that ceiling closer to the floor, oil is in for a rough time.
Finally, oil is subject to extreme geopolitical pressures. Two of the current pressures on oil prices are ISIS's selling of captured oil fields at discounts to fund operations and the United States and others encouraging prices to stay low so that funding is as menial as possible. Other countries' geopolitical power comes from control of oil (Russia), or transport (Turkey), or contributes the majority of their wealth (Norway) and so these countries have strong motivations to keep oil dominant.
If you define the terms of the bet I might be interested. Perhaps you friends won't retire in oil-extraction jobs, I can see that potentially happening, probably not in my lifetime (I'm 33). But the petroleum industry as a whole: liquid fuels; lubricants; plastics -- I can't see that going anywhere.
If you currently work at a company that produces fossil fuel products that are used to produce energy, I will bet you $100 that when you retire after 2050, your last job will not have been in that industry.
This seems like bad news. Given the ratio of Solar:Coal as source of power generation in US, ideally we would expect the Solar workers to be far less. This is a scaling problem.
Given how such a small percentage of US energy is solar, if it required more man power than coal plants I'd take it as a sign that we're doing something seriously unsustainable in the way we do solar.
edit: good points in the responses