America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by madd0ct0r »

http://www.treehugger.com/green-jobs/am ... iners.html
Still a nascent industry, but growing fast
The Solar Foundation, which has been releasing reports for a few years on the state of the solar industry in the U.S., has just launched a very cool interactive map that breaks the stats down state by state. This allows us to see that there are only 80 solar jobs in Alaska (not too surprising), and over 43,000 in California. Add all 50 states together, and solar employs 119,000 people in the country, a growth of 13.2% in 2012.
Another interesting way to gain perspective is to compare these solar jobs to the number of jobs created by other sectors. Looked at it this way, the Solar Foundation (using stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) found that there were more solar energy workers in Texas than ranchers, that solar workers outnumber actors in California, and that across the whole 50 states, there are more solar workers than coal miners.
Check out the article, they've some interactive graphs and shit.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by The Duchess of Zeon »

Coal miners. There are a heck of a lot more people employed in all the other areas of coal processing and transport.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Irbis »

Quick look here shows that coal power in 2011 was responsible for about 41% of electricity generated in USA, while solar was fractions of 1% (literally - one percent, and that in summer). Having more jobs going into that than coal (and these aren't even scientist jobs, but badly paid menial workers) just means we're making economy horrible inefficient, and for what? To replace greenhouse gasses with toxic panels sucking up rare elements we could better use elsewhere?

I took a look at this article, and this is one that was linked at the end. Care about environment is not simply caring about CO2 - humans encroaching on fragmented habitats and devouring more and more land for food and energy production are huge threat for a lot of species, and constructing such glass, dead deserts is excellent way to threaten more. Yes, this one is located on the desert, but not a lot of countries have those and if you want to build big solar plant in say France or Germany you need to destroy land with vital importance to local wildlife.

Another problem is again, location - deserts are by definition sparsely populated and you need to send the energy large distances, further hurting the efficiency of solar power (good only in summer days) and hurting economy (not only is solar energy more expensive, but a lot of industries works during night to take use of spare electricity - take that away and and you hurt economy doubly). Meanwhile, nuclear power plant with about 20x larger power than solar plant pictured above can be built in a building about the size of one of these central towers, produce energy day and night, regardless of clouds, be constructed where it's actually needed, and leave the land usage at minimum. But who cares, nuclear = evil.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Comparing solar the soaring production of natural gas in the US would be more relevant, as it is the growth of the latter industry that has been killing coal, not solar.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by madd0ct0r »

Irbis wrote:Quick look here shows that coal power in 2011 was responsible for about 41% of electricity generated in USA, while solar was fractions of 1% (literally - one percent, and that in summer). Having more jobs going into that than coal (and these aren't even scientist jobs, but badly paid menial workers) just means we're making economy horrible inefficient, and for what? To replace greenhouse gasses with toxic panels sucking up rare elements we could better use elsewhere?

I took a look at this article, and this is one that was linked at the end. Care about environment is not simply caring about CO2 - humans encroaching on fragmented habitats and devouring more and more land for food and energy production are huge threat for a lot of species, and constructing such glass, dead deserts is excellent way to threaten more. Yes, this one is located on the desert, but not a lot of countries have those and if you want to build big solar plant in say France or Germany you need to destroy land with vital importance to local wildlife.

Another problem is again, location - deserts are by definition sparsely populated and you need to send the energy large distances, further hurting the efficiency of solar power (good only in summer days) and hurting economy (not only is solar energy more expensive, but a lot of industries works during night to take use of spare electricity - take that away and and you hurt economy doubly). Meanwhile, nuclear power plant with about 20x larger power than solar plant pictured above can be built in a building about the size of one of these central towers, produce energy day and night, regardless of clouds, be constructed where it's actually needed, and leave the land usage at minimum. But who cares, nuclear = evil.

eh. I was about to knee-jerk reply, but I think we've been around the merry-go-round enough times :)

Out of interest, if solar worker numbers keep growing at this rate, how long till full employment in the USA?
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Terralthra »

madd0ct0r wrote:Out of interest, if solar worker numbers keep growing at this rate, how long till full employment in the USA?
The implication of this statement (and realistic economic assumptions) is that either a) solar workers will be horrifically underpaid, b) solar power will be ridiculously expensive/heavily subsidized, and/or c) solar work is a temporary gig to get installed power generation up to base levels, after which most of those workers are back to unemployed.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Simon_Jester »

Also, as noted, to really track employment in other forms of power-related industry, we need more information. Workers employed in gas would matter. So would workers employed in activity besides mining the coal: coal transport is a big part of what we do with railroads, and operating the plants themselves takes some manpower too.

We'd miss a lot of employment in the solar power industry too, if we only counted the people who work mining the silicon and fabricating the panels.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by energiewende »

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the US has 1.6GW of installed solar capacity with a 13% capacity factor, generating 200MW of electric power averaged over a year. The US has 343GW of installed coal capacity with a 62% capacity factor, generating 210GW of electric power averaged over a year. If the solar industry's argument is to be taken at face value, I conclude from this story that solar generation is at least 1,000x less labour efficient than coal generation.

As others have pointed out there are problems with the comparison offered which probably makes things less bad for solar, but if we judged industries as being superior because they employ more people rather than because they produce more, we would be forced to conclude Neolithic agriculture is superior to modern agriculture.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Simon_Jester »

This is disingenuous.

The real measure of solar's quality is cost per kilowatt-hour, factoring in pollution (CO2 and soot from coal, toxic mine tailings from solar). The high labor requirements of solar power come from the fact that virtually all solar power capacity in America has been installed in the past few years, and continues to be installed at a high rate.

On a side note, the argument "solar employs lots of people to install the infrastructure for the next decade" is actually pretty good; we need infrastructure jobs right now. By the time those jobs go away because we've installed enough solar cells, hopefully the employment crisis won't be such a problem.

The developed world is not, right now, suffering from a shortage of low to mid-skilled laborers to build things for us; needing a lot of them is not a drawback as long as overall cost-effectiveness is preserved.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by energiewende »

Simon_Jester wrote:This is disingenuous.

The real measure of solar's quality is cost per kilowatt-hour, factoring in pollution (CO2 and soot from coal, toxic mine tailings from solar).
Personally I agree that levelised cost is the important measure, but this is the measure chosen by the solar industry's lobbyists.
The high labor requirements of solar power come from the fact that virtually all solar power capacity in America has been installed in the past few years, and continues to be installed at a high rate.
I don't know if this is the main source of jobs in the solar industry, but let us suppose it is. Let us further suppose the entire 1.6GW current solar capacity was installed this year. This is not true but I am giving the solar lobby the benefit of the doubt. That 200MW of electricity actually generated is less than 0.1% of the US's total electricity consumption; it is probably less than 0.02% but I will say 0.1% to give them the benefit of the doubt. A solar panel lasts about 30 years, but I will say 50 to give the solar lobby the benefit of the doubt. Even after stacking every assumption in the solar industry's favour they would need to increase this workforce more than twenty times just to sustain a 100% solar grid after installation. Realistically you are looking at 10x that, but realistically such a grid would simply never be produced.
On a side note, the argument "solar employs lots of people to install the infrastructure for the next decade" is actually pretty good; we need infrastructure jobs right now. By the time those jobs go away because we've installed enough solar cells, hopefully the employment crisis won't be such a problem.
This assumes that the solar industry employs people who are currently unemployed rather than outbidding other industries for them, which would make all goods and services more expensive including those bought by the unemployed.
The developed world is not, right now, suffering from a shortage of low to mid-skilled laborers to build things for us; needing a lot of them is not a drawback as long as overall cost-effectiveness is preserved.
Make-work jobs with no externality would be better than creating large, long term structural distortions in the energy industry. It would also have the advantage of being able to guarantee that the participants were previously unemployed.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Simon_Jester »

energiewende wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:This is disingenuous.
The real measure of solar's quality is cost per kilowatt-hour, factoring in pollution (CO2 and soot from coal, toxic mine tailings from solar).
Personally I agree that levelised cost is the important measure, but this is the measure chosen by the solar industry's lobbyists.
Or some of them, at some times and places, in this particular instance.
The high labor requirements of solar power come from the fact that virtually all solar power capacity in America has been installed in the past few years, and continues to be installed at a high rate.
I don't know if this is the main source of jobs in the solar industry, but let us suppose it is. Let us further suppose the entire 1.6GW current solar capacity was installed this year. This is not true but I am giving the solar lobby the benefit of the doubt. That 200MW of electricity actually generated is less than 0.1% of the US's total electricity consumption; it is probably less than 0.02% but I will say 0.1% to give them the benefit of the doubt. A solar panel lasts about 30 years, but I will say 50 to give the solar lobby the benefit of the doubt. Even after stacking every assumption in the solar industry's favour they would need to increase this workforce more than twenty times just to sustain a 100% solar grid after installation. Realistically you are looking at 10x that, but realistically such a grid would simply never be produced.
I'm not sure that argument holds- a great deal depends on details. For example, installing solar panels on roofs is probably labor-intensive compared to building large generating facilities out in the desert, on a cost per kilowatt-hour basis.
On a side note, the argument "solar employs lots of people to install the infrastructure for the next decade" is actually pretty good; we need infrastructure jobs right now. By the time those jobs go away because we've installed enough solar cells, hopefully the employment crisis won't be such a problem.
This assumes that the solar industry employs people who are currently unemployed rather than outbidding other industries for them, which would make all goods and services more expensive including those bought by the unemployed.
At the moment much of the developed world suffers from a shortage of jobs, and a shortage of consumer demand to stimulate the regeneration of the service sector. Even if the solar industry hires people who are now employed, the people who just got their workers poached out from under them are going to react.

Seriously, would you expect a construction contractor to go "well shit, the solar industry's hiring all my workers, guess I'll stop building houses instead of hiring new people..." That sounds absurd to me.
The developed world is not, right now, suffering from a shortage of low to mid-skilled laborers to build things for us; needing a lot of them is not a drawback as long as overall cost-effectiveness is preserved.
Make-work jobs with no externality would be better than creating large, long term structural distortions in the energy industry. It would also have the advantage of being able to guarantee that the participants were previously unemployed.
I question whether solar is as disastrous a thing as you make it out to be- it has drawbacks and limitations, but as part of a broader solution to a systematic energy crisis, its "distorting" effects seem overblown. It's not like we have a coherent picture of what the world's energy supply will look like in 2050 or 2100, so it makes no sense to assume that solar is "distorting" that picture rather than being part of the picture.

In other words:

We are, whether we like it or not, entering an era of inherently higher energy costs. Oil is not going to get significantly cheaper and we are ultimately going to pass peak oil supply. The natural gas boom is nice for now in the US but can't last forever; we're already burning lower and lower grades of coal, the anthracite and high-end bituminous coals having been in heavy demand for about 150 years.

Those costs are going to show up somehow as the 21st century rolls on. Higher labor costs for upkeep of energy supplies is far from the worst way they can manifest.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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Or we could just build a bunch of nuke plants, take every coal plant offline, and instead use the coal for a coal to liquids program run from the excess energy of the nuke plants. I've reduced pollution and greenhouse gas and given the US a 200-300 year supply of oil at current consumption rates, and achieved energy independence so it can quit dicking around in the Middle East and tell them to go fuck themselves. Oh yeah, and created a crapload of high tech and high paying manufacturing industry jobs, plus a bunch of science & research jobs.

But we can't do that, because nuclear is bad, meanwhile the South Koreans, Chinese, and Indians among others are building away.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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Couldn't the problems of rare earths and pollution be largely obviated if we built large concentrated solar thermal plants rather than what appears to be the scattered and haphazard installation of photovoltaics?

Also, how well could flywheel batteries be used for load balancing? They seem to be more practical than molten salt batteries or pumped-storage hydroelectricity.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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Solar thermal plants throw away the advantage of solar in being mechanically simple and able to operate for very long lifespans with relatively modest maintenance demands. They also are inferior in low light situations like partial cloud cover, or dusy/dawn periods, vs solar cells that have a pretty linear relationship of sun exposure to energy production. This makes them unappealing in general. Some work is going into them, but it seems doubtful they'll ever get that far. I believe the Spanish have been building new some prototype ones. The California prototype shutdown as uneconomical.

Scattering solar panels everywhere is in fact very appealing, because it helps balance load on the power grid without fewer transmission losses, and placing them on roof tops ect... means no new land is being wasted on them. In some parts of the world like say the US North East or the southern UK the cost of land for a solar farm could be equal (I'm guessing) to the cost of the panels. That's one reason wind has gotten so far in Europe, while it might be a bit of an eyesore to some people you only need tiny plots of land dotted around the countryside you can carve off farmers fields.

Flywheel energy storage is being worked on by some folks, but you'd need either a very large or very numerous ones to provide storage for multiple hours (as in the whole night) instead of just minutes for load balancing purposes. This is kind of unappealing with the shear amount of large dangerous moving parts that get involved, and large numbers of expensive high precision bearings required. But a fair number of new concepts are coming out for energy storage that might pay off, the British are working on a very interesting compressed air storage project for example, which is appealing since you could build storage silos in urban areas with minimal safety hazards, basically none unless you are directly in the path of a burst pipe at very close range. Normally this method would be inefficient because of energy losses from the cooling effect of the air expanding when you release it reducing pressure. However the idea is you would reheat the expanding air using waste heat from energy intensive industries like oil refineries or computer server farms. Its easy to imagine an oil refinery which just adds a new tank farm for compressed air storage, though it might look more like a cluster of grain silos.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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aerius wrote:Or we could just build a bunch of nuke plants, take every coal plant offline, and instead use the coal for a coal to liquids program run from the excess energy of the nuke plants.
Okay, let's do that too/instead. As long as Fischer-Tropsch plants don't make gasoline so cheap that we end up burning as much carbon as we would anyway, we will win pretty seriously in the long haul.

My point is that there is nothing wrong with trying to make solar part of the energy supply. This is not a zero sum game except for stupid people. Worst case, thirty or forty years from now, current solar installations prove infeasible to replace, we don't have money to screw around, and they're replaced with the most economical non-dinopowered source available. So it's bluntly stupid to be pooh-poohing about solar cell installation being somehow wrong and expensive because you'd rather we were building BIG HARD SCIENCE nuclear reactors.
Sea Skimmer wrote:Scattering solar panels everywhere is in fact very appealing, because it helps balance load on the power grid without fewer transmission losses, and placing them on roof tops ect... means no new land is being wasted on them. In some parts of the world like say the US North East or the southern UK the cost of land for a solar farm could be equal (I'm guessing) to the cost of the panels. That's one reason wind has gotten so far in Europe, while it might be a bit of an eyesore to some people you only need tiny plots of land dotted around the countryside you can carve off farmers fields.
That does make a good reason to do that then. Good.

What I meant was more that scattered installations almost have to be labor-intensive: installing 100 square feet of solar cells on your sloping roof will take more physical work than installing 100 square feet of solar cells in an installation in Nebraska as part of a 1000000 square foot solar farm. That is not necessarily a bad thing, at this point we shouldn't be turning up our noses at honest work as long as it's not stupidly expensive or wasteful work.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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Simon_Jester wrote:Or some of them, at some times and places, in this particular instance.
The lobbyists are not stupid. They choose this measure because they know that while solar power is both labour and cost inefficient, almost no one thinks that cost inefficient industries are good while a lot of people seem to think labour inefficient industries are good.
I'm not sure that argument holds- a great deal depends on details. For example, installing solar panels on roofs is probably labor-intensive compared to building large generating facilities out in the desert, on a cost per kilowatt-hour basis.
I already gave you unreasonable concessions amounting a full order of magnitude. If you're not satisfied, here's another one I didn't even tell you about: I assumed no increase in energy demand over the next 50 years. Of course neither of us has a crystal ball but the question is what is a reasonable projection and what is wishful thinking.
At the moment much of the developed world suffers from a shortage of jobs, and a shortage of consumer demand to stimulate the regeneration of the service sector. Even if the solar industry hires people who are now employed, the people who just got their workers poached out from under them are going to react.

Seriously, would you expect a construction contractor to go "well shit, the solar industry's hiring all my workers, guess I'll stop building houses instead of hiring new people..." That sounds absurd to me.
All they will see is that it is now more expensive to employ people, forcing them to raise prices, which reduces demand for their good and services and therefore reduces their labour requirement.

I think you have misunderstood the mainstream views on government interventionism to increase employment. Both New Keynesians and Monetarists agree that markets only fail to achieve full employment because there are non-ideal barriers to employers taking up excess labour supply, not because there are literally no useful jobs these people can do. New Keynesians believe that deficit spending by governments can achieve full employment: but the deficit is the key, not the mere fact of spending. If the government funded solar subsidies from increased taxes they wouldn't expect employment to increase while if the government funded anything-but-solar on a deficit they would still expect employment to increase. Monetarists argue that by increasing the money supply one can eliminate involuntary unemployment without any deficit at all.
I question whether solar is as disastrous a thing as you make it out to be- it has drawbacks and limitations, but as part of a broader solution to a systematic energy crisis, its "distorting" effects seem overblown. It's not like we have a coherent picture of what the world's energy supply will look like in 2050 or 2100, so it makes no sense to assume that solar is "distorting" that picture rather than being part of the picture.

In other words:

We are, whether we like it or not, entering an era of inherently higher energy costs. Oil is not going to get significantly cheaper and we are ultimately going to pass peak oil supply. The natural gas boom is nice for now in the US but can't last forever; we're already burning lower and lower grades of coal, the anthracite and high-end bituminous coals having been in heavy demand for about 150 years.

Those costs are going to show up somehow as the 21st century rolls on. Higher labor costs for upkeep of energy supplies is far from the worst way they can manifest.
Solar power is the most expensive seriously considered method to achieve electricity generation with negligible emissions. The distorting effect is the large increase in electricity prices a major solar component would produce above what is necessary due to fuel scarcity. This represents a real reduction in standard of living in countries that extensively subsidise solar power. The choice is not solar vs CO2, or solar vs oil (oil is not a major fuel used in electricity generation), it's solar vs nuclear, or solar vs CCS.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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it would only be more expensive to hire people if there wasn't already a large pool of unemployed champing at the bit for semi-skilled work.

I just don't understand what you think is bad about this situation? Is it money on subsidies is being wasted, or are you arguing that solar installed on people's roof's (which is what we're talking about here) will somehow drive up the cost of main's electricity?
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Simon_Jester wrote: What I meant was more that scattered installations almost have to be labor-intensive: installing 100 square feet of solar cells on your sloping roof will take more physical work than installing 100 square feet of solar cells in an installation in Nebraska as part of a 1000000 square foot solar farm. That is not necessarily a bad thing, at this point we shouldn't be turning up our noses at honest work as long as it's not stupidly expensive or wasteful work.
Well sure, but then that solar farm in Nebraska will need to pay someone to clean the cells for however long the cells last, while the homeowner will do this job for free in his/her spare time. Remote farm sites can also involve a lot of extra wiring effort and heavy construction for the cabling runs that just aren't a factor at all in small installations. Not just anyone can build solar farms.

One place distributed solar does take a major cost hit is installing grid aligned transformers, if you wish to be able to put power back into the mains, though this more an issue of the hardware cost then labor. Small ones are just always going to cost more per watt of capacity, and this cost hit can be relevant even within the context of a small home installation vs a home installation able to power the entire house (generally if you always install a big one, just because you'd be double screwed if you put in a small one and ever wanted more panels), but it isn't actually necessary to do so. You can save money up front and have the panels just dump excess power into the ground wire if you want.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

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Wind has its own problems, mainly storage and transmission. We have had most of our promising wind projects on standstill for nearly three years now due to widespread NIMBY syndrome in Germany.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by energiewende »

madd0ct0r wrote:it would only be more expensive to hire people if there wasn't already a large pool of unemployed champing at the bit for semi-skilled work.
This assumes 'labour' is a homogeneous, interchangeable commodity and it isn't. But I don't think I explained the basic point well enough: if you make electricity more expensive by mandating or subsidising the use of solar panels then people have to pay more for electricity (or taxes) than before, and so they can buy less of other things which reduces demand in those sectors and reduces employment. This is why deficit spending is what matters, not just government spending on anything. And the deficit issue is detatched from the question of what to spend the money on. The government could run deficit stimulus used to pay people to dig holes and fill them in again until the market has adjusted and unemployment returns to 2006/7 levels.
I just don't understand what you think is bad about this situation? Is it money on subsidies is being wasted, or are you arguing that solar installed on people's roof's (which is what we're talking about here) will somehow drive up the cost of main's electricity?
Spending on solar panels rather than digging holes is worse because solar panels remain costly for a long time. They are a capital investment that takes decades to produce a yield (which is invariably much lower than the cost of the investment). Inducing solar power to be used will increase peoples' living costs, either via their electricity bills, mandated purchases of panels that will never show a return, or increased taxes depending on the route chosen by government.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by madd0ct0r »

No, that's wrong.

If you spend $500 on digging holes and $500 on installing solar panels, 1 year later you have a lumpy field and a still working solar panel. It's much better as deficit spending then hole digging.

As for, 'is it a good investment of taxes' - then the answer is pretty clearly no. There's much more cost effective ways to generate power, leaving people more money to buy shit which in turn (probably) produces more jobs in the economy. If you are looking for a short term solution to angry unemployed riots, then we're back to the hole vs solar comparison.

So why might the goverment decide to 'sponsor an ineffcient solar industry' (apart from possibly the angry mob reduction strategy). Could we be looking at a nascent industry the gov might wish to see developed domestically? Is it a standard economics play to support an inferior industry you value until it can compete by itself? Is energy security something the USA gov values enough to have more then one plan running? Is this something the US can easily afford with minimal risk?

Gobsmacked, I am!
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energiewende
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by energiewende »

madd0ct0r wrote:No, that's wrong.

If you spend $500 on digging holes and $500 on installing solar panels, 1 year later you have a lumpy field and a still working solar panel. It's much better as deficit spending then hole digging.
Hole digging is (almost) pure labour cost and can be ended as soon as the economy has recovered. Solar panels have a large capital cost and to be worthwhile they will be subsidised for decades after any short term economic problems are gone. A better comparison would be $500/year for 3 years vs $1,000/year for 30 years.
As for, 'is it a good investment of taxes' - then the answer is pretty clearly no. There's much more cost effective ways to generate power, leaving people more money to buy shit which in turn (probably) produces more jobs in the economy. If you are looking for a short term solution to angry unemployed riots, then we're back to the hole vs solar comparison.

So why might the goverment decide to 'sponsor an ineffcient solar industry' (apart from possibly the angry mob reduction strategy). Could we be looking at a nascent industry the gov might wish to see developed domestically? Is it a standard economics play to support an inferior industry you value until it can compete by itself? Is energy security something the USA gov values enough to have more then one plan running? Is this something the US can easily afford with minimal risk?

Gobsmacked, I am!
Of the schemes seriously discussed, solar is the least cost efficient means of achieving any of those goals, and the absolute cost is only small so long as grid penetration also remains small.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Terralthra »

energiewende wrote:
madd0ct0r wrote:No, that's wrong.

If you spend $500 on digging holes and $500 on installing solar panels, 1 year later you have a lumpy field and a still working solar panel. It's much better as deficit spending then hole digging.
Hole digging is (almost) pure labour cost and can be ended as soon as the economy has recovered. Solar panels have a large capital cost and to be worthwhile they will be subsidised for decades after any short term economic problems are gone. A better comparison would be $500/year for 3 years vs $1,000/year for 30 years.
Errrr, they've already been "subsidized" by being built by state-financed labor and having the capital cost paid by the same state. They may have to be operated for 30 years in order for the state to see a profit, but that's not the same as being subsidized for 30 years. They have additional capital costs compared to hole-digging, but you also get the solar cell at the end, which can generate electricity. That electricity may be lower-efficiency than other forms of generation, but that makes them worse than the other forms of electricity, not worse than literal holes.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by energiewende »

Most countries that subsidise solar power do so with a feed-in tariff, which is a guaranteed price that will be paid for solar energy sold to the grid that is substantially higher than the market value of the electricity. This is a subsidy that will be paid over the lifetime of the panel. Germany and Spain for instance now have tens of billions of Euros of feed-in tariff liabilities, but they are not paying tens of billions each year. My description of the financial arrangements is in fact accurate, not yours.

In the US there are federal subsidies and a patchwork of state subsidies. The federal level subsidy is closest to your description, a 30% "tax rebate" (actually it has nothing to do with the amount of tax due on the transaction) on purchase and installation of solar panels. But this is not enough to make solar viable on its own which is why there are such disparities in uptake of solar power as mentioned in the original report. State level subsidies often take the form of mandatory prices for solar energy or certificates that companies have to buy that indicate a certain proportion of their electricity has been sourced from solar plants (they don't have to actually own the plants provided they buy enough certificates, thereby subsidising others who build them). These are essentially feed-in tariffs except utilities are liable rather than the government.

You'll notice that these sorts of subsidies also have no employment effect. They're not funded by debt so employment is simply transferred from sectors who sales are displaced or production costs increased by higher electricity bills to the solar industry, destroying wealth over all because electricity is now being produced less cost efficiently. What you've missed is that you can do a lot worse than digging a hole and filling it in again: you can dig a hole, throw a lot of valuable goods into it, and then fill it in again. This is what solar power does.


EDIT: Perhaps a quantitative example would help.

Plan A: I pay 1,000,000 workers $5/hour each to dig holes and fill them in again. Over 3 years this costs me $30 billion.

Plan B: I pay 1,000,000 workers $5/hour each to produce solar panels. Each hour the solar panel machines also consume $5 of input resources, replacement parts costs, etc. Over 3 years this costs me $60 billion. Over their lifetime the panels produce electricity that is worth $10 billion.

By choosing Plan B I lose $20 billion over having chosen Plan A.
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Re: America now has more workers in solar than coal.

Post by Simon_Jester »

Then it comes down to the numbers- is solar so staggeringly inefficient that it costs six times as much to set them up and maintain them as the electricity they produce is worth? Or at least enough to make your analogy valid?

And that implies other questions:

1) To what extent could we mitigate this inefficiency by economies of scale?

2) To what extent is it in the state's interest to subsidize solar power anyway, knowing that it is inefficient, so as to avoid the opportunity cost of pollution and global warming down the line?

3) To what extent will the cost-inefficiency be affected by the totally predictable increases in energy costs that are likely to occur as the 21st century rolls on?

And don't assume that just because few power plants burn oil, that peak oil won't affect energy costs. Among other things, it's likely that future demand for motor vehicles is going to shift toward electric cars, or cars that burn fuels like hydrogen or ammonia. Synthesizing the latter two takes energy; they cannot be pumped out of the ground. And electric cars obviously increase electrical power demand by quite a bit- you replace a liter of gasoline with 10 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy.

There is also the possibility of hitting, if not peak coal, at least peak quality coal, which will make problems even worse as coal-fired industry has to buy more rocks and burn them to make the same amount of electricity.
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