photo: Todd Woody
When Green Wombat offered up as a “talking point” the observation that the wind industry now employs more people than coal mining, the post set off some vociferous chatter in the blogosphere, fueled in part by my inadvertent error of referring to the “coal industry” in a subsequent reference rather than “coal mining.”
Eoin O’Carroll at the The Christian Science Monitor‘s Bright Green Blog called the comparison between 85,000 wind industry jobs and 81,000 coal mining jobs “bogus,” citing sources pegging direct industry-wide employment in coal at 136,000 to 174,000. Other commentators pointed out that wind power currently provides only about 1-2% of the United States’ electricity while coal supplies around 49%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Fair enough. But let’s add some context. As Salon‘s Andrew Leonard pointed out, “The key takeaway shouldn’t be employment, but growth rates.” Employment in the wind industry grew 70% between 2007 and 2008 as a result of a 50% jump in the amount of installed wind capacity in the United States last year. And this number bears repeating: 42% of all new U.S. electricity generation in 2008 came from wind farms, the equivalent of building 14 600-megawatt coal-fired power plants – without the environmental devastation that comes from strip-mining and releasing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That extraordinary growth in wind power was, until the recession hit, reviving abandoned factories in the industrial Midwest as European turbine makers and their suppliers set up shop close to what has become the world’s largest wind market.
While wind produces a tiny percentage of the country’s total electricity today, the U.S. does not have a national power grid and energy generation varies widely by state. (For instance, in-state coal-fired power plants supplied 86% of Ohio’s electricity in 2006, according to the Energy Department, but only 1.1% of California’s – though the Golden State obtains about 20% of its electricity from out-of-state coal plants, a practice being phased out by its global warming law).
In Texas, wind accounts for 4.9% of the state’s electricity generation, according to the state grid operator. Last week, Texas regulators announced they would invest $5 billion to expand transmission lines to bring wind power from remote west Texas wind farms to big cities like Dallas and Houston. That $5 billion, no doubt, will also generate quite a few green jobs and trigger even more wind development once the credit crunch eases.
Jon Wellinghoff, the new acting chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, has identified the Great Plains – dubbed the Saudi Arabia of wind – as the prime candidate for a massive power grid project to connect the region’s wind farms to metropolitan regions currently dependent on coal-fired power. Again, such an initiative would generate thousands of jobs. (A 2008 Department of Energy report found that if such transmission hurdles were overcome the nation could obtain as much as 20% of its electricity from wind farms.)
Obviously, coal is not going away any time soon. (And those wind turbines are made of steel, after all.) But with the Obama administration willing to spend billions on a smart power grid to expand green energy production and half the states mandating renewable energy targets – not to mention a looming national cap-and-trade system that would assign a price to the environmental cost of coal-fired electricity – it seems clear which industry will be generating the jobs of the future.
The factors that are germane to both the political and technical aspects of energy are many and complex. Nonetheless, 3 that stand out for me are:
– If the number of jobs is the measure of success or value, then let’s park all the combines and tractors, and return 60% of the workforce to growing food, as was the case in 1850.
– Capacity numbers are easily inflated. The rated capacity of wind-driven electrical generators is a very poor measure of the amount of power that one can rely on being delivered by those generators, due to vagaries winds, high downtime, and the difficulties related to connection to and synchronization with the “grid.” With few exceptions, delivered capacity will be well less than 30% of the rated capacity of the generator.
– CO2 is not a pollutant. (And if it were, then water vapor is also a pollutant, and the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere is ~ 70x that of CO2.)
If coal fire plants are environmentally friendly, let’s have a contest. You stay in a 10′ by 10′ room pumped full of exhaust from a coal plant and I’ll stay in the same size room full of wind turban exhaust. We’ll see who is healthier after one hour.
Hmmm…funny logic, E.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, CO2 *IS* a pollutant, and is to be regulated by the EPA as such.
Lastly, most of the increase in demand for electricity in the U.S. is for summer PEAK power, which is often coincident with high wind generation, and definitely coincident with high output for solar generation. And if you read the Rocky Mountain Institute’s analysis, wind IS 98% reliable at 50% capacity, if measured throughout a region–it’s pretty much always blowing somewhere, if your service area and grid service are wide enough.
But the real source of green jobs is neither coal nor wind, but weatherstripping. If we can reduce demand by 25% using caulking guns, that will buy time to design and install truly benign, reliable sources of power.
But I do like your suggestion to return to small, family farms, caring for the soil, and creating more green jobs in labor-intensive, non-fossil-fuel-based agriculture. As we might have said in the ’60s, “Farm out!”
Paul Sheldon, http://www.natcapsolutions.org/about.htm
So what is the employment for the coal industry as a whole (mining AND power)? Given that coal supplies about half of our power it’s likely large. Even that number won’t count all the employment in rail associated with coal.
The bottom line is that coal plants need to and will continue to run; however, they will not be replaced as they go offline with old age (many are 40+ yrs old, and very few have been built in the last 25 yrs). They will go offline only as the cost of operation goes up with environmental compliance costs (this has already happened to some extent with SOx and NOx restrictions in the clean air act). The next wave will come when a price of carbon is set that is high enough to make these plants unprofitable. Until then the equipment will be repaired and replaced to keep them running.
What will they be replaced with? Well the only large baseload technologies is nuclear or combined cycle gas turbines. Wind and solar may go rapidly, but remember they are starting at basically zero and even with high growth they are near zero (a few % of electricity). Also you cannot replace a 600 MW coal plant with 600 MW of nameplate wind because 600 MW of wind is really an average of maybe 200 MW over the year.
In the end, if you are serious about reducing carbon emissions you need to be both serious about making wind/solar 15-20% of the mix AND serious about replacing coal with nuclear. Both must be done to kill the coal plants.
Does anyone else see an issue with the number of jobs required to produce 1-2% of the nation’s electricity vs. 49% of the nation’s electricity. If this level of labor is required to produce 1-2% of the nation’s electricity, how can we afford wind generated electricity above those levels? The labor component in the cost equation will be overwhelming. It would appear that currently the less labor intensive coal subsidizes the cost of labor associated with wind.
What will replace coal plants?
The answer is solar thermal(CSP)power plants with heat storage in the southwest. They can provide steady, non intermittent, base load dispatchable power day and night.
Electricity prices from CSP are 12-17 cents/kWh and will fall to under 10cents/kWh within ten years or less. Further price reduction as the industry gets up to scale will bring the price down to 5-8 cents/kWh about the same as wind.
Coal with carbon capture and sequestration would be at least 16 cents/kWh. So will new nuclear plant power. Neither will be able to compete with solar and wind on price.
We could build enough solar thermal by 2030 to replace most of the coal fired plants that don’t have CCS.
They can be built fast, can be air or water cooled, and can even desalinize water while generating power(when water cooled).
This and wind should be the top priorities now. They are ready to build, which is not true of clean coal or nuclear. A Hundreds GW of of wind could be built before the first nuke with it’s 1 GW goes online in a decade or so. Similar progress with CSP can be attained. The only obstacle is political will.
Moderator I forgot to sign the first last comment, please delete.
Doug
In regard to nuclear, you are dreaming. It won’t be as big a solution as you imagine, too expensive and too slow to build, not to mention all the other negatives of nuclear.
“The time to plan and construct a coal-fired power plant without CCS equipment is generally 5–8 yr. CCS technology would be added during this period. The development time is another 1–3 yr. Thus, the total planning-to-operation time for a standard coal plant with CCS is estimated to be 6–11 yr. If the coal-CCS plant is an IGCC plant, the time may be longer since none has been built to date.”
“….. based on the most optimistic future projections of nuclear power construction times of 4–5 yr5 and those times based on historic data,64 we assume future construction times due to nuclear power plants as 4–9 yr. Thus, the overall time between planning and operation of a nuclear power plant ranges from 10–19 yr.”
“The median construction time for reactors in the US built since 1970 is 9 yr.”
“For CSP, the construction time is similar to that of a wind farm. For example, Nevada Solar One required about 1.5 yr for construction. Similarly, an ethanol refinery requires about 1.5 yr to construct. We assume a range in both cases of 1–2 yr. We also assume the development time is the same as that for a wind farm, 1–3 yr. Thus, the overall planning-to-operation time for a CSP plant or ethanol refinery is 2–5 yr. We assume the same time range for tidal, wave, and solar-PV power plants.”
http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=EE&Year=2009&ManuscriptID=b809990c&Iss=Advance_Article