Coal Industry Hands Out Pink Slips While Green Collar Jobs Take Off

[kristopher]

Coal Industry Hands Out Pink Slips While Green Collar Jobs Take Off
Posted on July 11th, 2008

ENN: Washington, D.C.: A transition to renewable energy sources promises significant global job gains at a time when the coal industry has been hemorrhaging jobs for years, according to the latest Vital Signs Update released by the Worldwatch Institute.

The coal, oil, and natural gas industries require steadily fewer jobs as high-cost production equipment takes the place of human capital. Many hundreds of thousands of coal mining jobs have been shed in China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and South Africa during the last two decades, sometimes in the face of expanding production. In the United States alone, coal industry employment has fallen by half in the last 20 years, despite a one-third increase in production.

“Renewables are poised to tackle our energy crisis and create millions of new jobs worldwide,” according to Worldwatch Senior Researcher Michael Renner. “Meanwhile, fossil fuel jobs are increasingly becoming fossils themselves, as coal mining communities and others worry about their livelihoods.”

Strong government support has allowed Germany, Spain, and Denmark to emerge as leaders in renewable energy development-and green jobs. The German government reports that the country was home to an estimated 259,000 direct and indirect jobs in the renewables sector in 2006. This figure is expected to reach 400,000-500,000 by 2020, and 710,000 by 2030. In the United States, the renewables sector employed close to 200,000 people directly and 246,000 indirectly in 2006, due mostly to leadership at the state level. China is rapidly catching up in manufacturing of solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind turbines and is already the dominant global force in solar hot water development....

http://www.earthportal.org/news/?p=1383

[NNadir]

1. Yeah, those great jobs washing deposited dust off of solar cells probably pay great.

This latest "world's largest" plant - thus far it is all talk - is supposed a thermal plant, consisting of a huge array of mirrors in the desert hooked up to Stirling generators. Part of the external costs of this plant, besides the thousands of metric tons of glass and metal that have to be reduced, will involve fuel for the tanker trucks full of Windex that will have to go out to the Imperial Valley whenever the Santa Anna winds blow dust clouds up, or the ash from burning homes and chaparral falls, and of course the external costs of chopping down a few forests to make a few million rolls of super soft paper towels. Renewable energy advocates are always noting how renewable energy is always making jobs, although they specifically decline to state what the jobs pay. Let's just say that we're lucky that the Imperial Valley is on the route between El Salvador and Los Angeles, the efforts of our border guarding racists notwithstanding.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/7/6/43625/01704/929/547228">Life Cycle Analysis of Solar (And Wind) Power in Switzerland

I note that those jobs recycling electronic waste in China are highly valued, since Chinese are proud of their ability to sustain high concentrations of halogenated carbons in their livers and fat tissue.

[kristopher]

2. Of course your and your employers prefer a nuclear priesthood...

Your article finds solar a 3-6 year energy payback even in a country with poor performance such as Switzerland. Here the energy payback is between 1-4 years. This gives solar an Energy Return on Energy Invested of what, between about 10:1 and 30:1 with better technology being developed every day?

You point to that particular LCA analysis because you think it supports the contention that solar is a "dirty" technology even though the article:
1. didn't really examine the toxicity issue and provided at best a ballpark guess.
2. didn't look at the effectiveness of mitigation efforts in dealing with toxic by-products of production.
3. Was comparing it to the cleanest form of fossil energy - natural gas.

Yes, you would have us believe that the nuclear is SAFER than solar; and I guess that says it all about your judgement.

[NNadir]

3. Only a moral nitwit assumes that one cannot have an opinion about energy

without being paid to do so.

In fact, 100% percent of the famous moral nitwits who run around saying "solar will save us" - that would include Amoral Lovins - who is paid huge "consulting" bribes - I mean "donations" - I mean "consulting fees" by dangerous fossil fuel companies - including Shell Oil, of Nigerian fame, and the infamous Arco, and Gerhard Schroeder, a 100% owned subsidiary of Gazprom - are paid (off) by dangerous fossil fuel companies.

In general, 100% of the moral nitwits here who claim that "solar will save us" end up trying to talk about me because they either have no science to back up their claims or they simply make stuff up.

Now, there is zero evidence that you read the paper cited in the article you didn't understand and your claim that they "didn't really examine the toxicity issue" because you are 100% unfamiliar with the contents of the scientific literature.

They fully discussed the "mitigation methods" that were purely theoretical. Since you didn't read the article - don't know how to read the article - you have no concept whatsoever of what its contents are or what they mean. In fact, they were not engaged in talking about your deepest fantasies and wishful thinking. On the contrary they exhaustively examined existing documents on the technology of manufacturing solar cells - the external costs of which are hidden precisely and only because solar energy is a trivial and useless form of energy.

They noted the elaborate claims about new technologies, but noted - not using the contempt that I use - that it's all just talk.

In fact, the solar industry has always talked big, but it has never delivered on its promises. Never, at least on a 0.1 exajoule scale.

Finally, I note with consistent and due contempt that one needs engage any "solar will save us" dumb fundie anti-nuke you will end up getting some delusional sentence where it is alleged that there is a "clean" dangerous fossil fuel.

There are no such things as clean fossil fuels. Neither you nor any other dangerous fossil fuel apologist knows what to do with the waste, how to prevent dangerous fossil fuel war, how to prevent dangerous fossil fuel terrorism, or how to face dangerous fossil fuel depletion, or dangerous fossil fuel economics.

I note, with contempt, that the entire "solar will save us" anti-nuke religion is not concerned with dangerous fossil fuels, but rather with the ignorant destruction and vandalizing of the world's largest, by far, form of climate change gas free energy.

One more thing dipshit. Your talk about a "nuclear priesthood" is your talk, not mine. I am not an illiterate radiation paranoid. I recognize right away that neither you or any other of your anti-nuke co-religionists can produce a single case of a single person injured by the storage of used nuclear fuel. NOT ONE. Therefore, it is obvious that no "priesthood" is required. The need for such a "priesthood" is entirely more religious balderdash from the anti-nuke religion.

The fact that you are faith based has nothing to do with me. You don't know me from a hill of beans, and all I know of you is that you are uninformed and dogmatic. I couldn't care less about what you do beyond this website but you can fully expect that I will confront 100% of the delusional anti-nuke statements you make.

The external costs of various forms of energy are all over the scientific literature. I have cited such literature and you, like your co-religionists - have cited nothing but your big mouth and big biases.

Nuclear energy is safer than solar electricity, and solar is marginally safer than dangerous natural gas, which is not saying much because dangerous natural gas is killing the planet.

Got it?

No?

Let me repeat it, kiddie: Dangerous natural gas is killing the planet.

Still don't got it?

Why am I in no fucking way surprised.

[kristopher]

4. My but this is useful

There are about 1200 coal plants in the US with a nameplate generating capacity 390GW+-. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav2/html_tables/epav2t23p1.html and
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epav2/html_tables/epav2t45p1.html

Coal plants average about a 79% capacity factor. The production by coal of 390GWx79% equals 308GW that we need to deliver to 'technically' replace coal - the worst offender for climate change and pollution bar none. That would be a total production of 2,698,080 TWh/year.

Lets leave natural gas and nuclear as is for the moment.


Current generation turbines are 1/5-2 MW onshore and 2-3.6MW offshore The onshore probably will be slow to achieve further increase because they are limited by the ability to transport the rotors overland. But the next generation of offshore wind farms are between 5-7MW per unit nameplate and can be expected to operate at 40+% capacity factor. Figure the build-out in the corridor Picken's speaks of to deliver about 30% capacity factor.


In near shore <50meter deep waters, and allowing exclusion areas for fishing grounds, beach replenishment borrow areas, avian flyways, shipping channels and visual buffering for the tourist areas, there is just off the coast of tiny Delaware enough room to place:
19GW with GE 3.6MW turbines
26GW with 5MW turbines (vestas?)
37GW with the RePower 7MW turbine

Using a capacity factor of 40% (it is actually estimated to be 44%) that yields:
7.6GW for the 19GW with GE 3.6MW turbines
10.4GW for the 26GW with 5MW turbines (vestas?)
14.6GW for the 37GW with the RePower 7MW turbine

So just off the 25 mile coast of little old bitty Delaware, we can get an output equal to between 7 and 14 nuclear reactors - with no waste storage problems or risks of proliferation.

As for finding the space for solar - why don't we start with roofs?
As of 2000 in the US residential sector alone there were about 83 million buildings with a combined square footage of roughly 170 billion square feet or 18 billion meters^2 or 1.8 billion km^2.

Using an average capacity factor of 14% against the average 1800Kwh/1m^2/year of sunlight gives us 252kWh/year/m^2.

18 billion meters X 252kWh = 4,536,000 Twh/year of actual production to replace the 2,698,080 TWh/year coal is presently generating.

And we can let the homeowners be responsible for cleaning them.

Finally, we add in storage through the batteries of V2G EV and similar battery packs for the home so that those majority of those 83 million homes are mostly self sufficient and there is also plenty of storage to maximize wind and large solar thermal arrays.

What is the rush to nuclear with its KNOWN pitfalls? Why not a goal like described above first and then see what the need for nuclear ends up being? Of the two choices, we are much better off in the long run (in money, energy security, national security, energy returned on energy invested and environmental footprint) to do this without nuclear if we can.

So again, what is your rush to promote nuclear?

Data on buildings drawn from http://www.btscoredatabook.net/?id=search_table_title&q=Single-Family+Homes&t=5
Tables 5 and 21

[Name removed]

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