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There are about as many solar jobs as coal jobs in the US - Vox

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/18/7735223/solar-jobs

There are about as many solar jobs as coal jobs in the US

Rooftop solar power is fairly labor-intensive. You need people to design
and manufacture panels. Then people to market the panels to households.
Then people to come and install them on rooftops.

The US solar industry employed about 174,000 people in 2014

That means lots of jobs. Even though solar power provides just a small
fraction of electricity in the United States — about 0.4 percent — the
solar industry employed roughly 174,000 people in 2014, according to a
survey <http://thesolarfoundation.org/> from the non-profit Solar
Foundation. And the industry is expected to add another 36,000 jobs this
year, as rooftop installations keep rising at a rapid clip
<http://www.vox.com/2014/9/29/6849723/solar-power-net-metering-utilities-fight-states>
.

To put this in perspective, 174,000 is pretty comparable to the number of
workers employed by the US coal industry, if you add up
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Coal_and_jobs_in_the_United_States#Total_coal-related_jobs>
everyone employed in coal mining (about 80,000), plus coal transportation
and coal power plants.** Yet coal provides 39 percent
<http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3> of America's electricity
— far, far more than solar does.
So are all these solar jobs a good thing?

There are a few different ways to look at this.

From an employment perspective, it's great. The US has been reeling from a
brutal recession, and any source of new jobs is welcome. In 2014, solar
companies added positions 20 times faster than the rest of the economy, the
Solar Foundation said. And these are also decent-paying jobs, with average
wages around $20 to $24 per hour. About 55 percent were installation jobs,
19 percent were manufacturing, and 12 percent sales.

Solar power is still far more labor-intensive than other sources

Another way to look at these numbers, however, is to point out that solar
power is a pretty inefficient way of creating energy. As one 2012
University of Tennessee study found
<https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1502352-baker-center-solar-incentives-2.html>,
it takes far more manpower to generate one megawatt-hour of electricity
from solar than it does from any other energy source.

That's not necessarily a good thing. If the world wants to avoid drastic
global warming
<http://www.vox.com/2014/11/2/7146215/ipcc-climate-change-synthesis-report-phasing-out-fossil-fuels>,
we need to replace dirtier sources of energy like coal with cleaner sources
— solar, wind, nuclear — and fast. And the high cost of solar is a real
impediment here. Here's Michael Liebreich, head of Bloomberg New Energy
Finance, making this point on Twitter:

If anything, Liebreich added, a solar industry that created fewer jobs
could be a positive development:

Now, the good news is that this is already starting to happen to some
extent. Analysts expect residential solar systems to keep getting cheaper
through 2017
<http://www.vox.com/2014/10/16/6987915/solar-power-cheaper-balance-of-systems-costs>,
thanks to reductions in "balance of systems" costs — things like
installation, financing, engineering, and so on.

One example: As the solar market expands, word of mouth will spread, and it
will become easier to find new customers without the need to hire as many
people in sales.

[image: price of solar power]

(GTM Research)

If power plants had to internalize all their social costs, clean energy
would fare better

There's another key point here: Solar is far more expensive than coal if
you *only* look at the direct costs of producing electricity. But there are
indirect social costs, too. Coal plants produce lots of pollution — soot,
mercury, coal ash — that foul the air and water and make people sick. These
costs don't show up on electricity bills. Instead, they're dumped on the
broader public, in the former of shorter lives or higher hospital bills. Coal
plants are also a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, causing damage
through global warming.

If power plants had to internalize all these social costs, then sources
like wind, solar, or even nuclear power would be far more competitive — as
this 2012 paper
<http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/paying_too_much_for_energy_the_true_costs_of_our_energy_choices/>
by economists Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney explained in detail. (One
way to do that would be through a carbon tax
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/23/seven-thrilling-facts-about-carbon-taxes-from-the-cbo/>
on fossil fuels.)

In other words: It would be a major boon for clean energy if solar power
keeps getting cheaper and less labor-intensive over time. But getting
fossil-fuel users to pay for all the external costs they impose would also
make a huge difference.
As the solar industry expands, will it have more clout?

For years, a significant number of US politicians have opposed action on
climate change or stricter regulations on air pollution. And oftentimes,
this opposition comes in the form of jobs talk: Obama is waging a "war on
coal"
<http://www.vox.com/cards/obama-climate-plan/is-obama-waging-a-war-on-coal>
and killing coal jobs. That worry isn't wholly unfounded. The combination
of cheap natural gas and new air pollution regulations really is shrinking
the coal industry. And, in areas like West Virginia or eastern Kentucky,
that really does mean fewer jobs.

As the coal industry shrinks, its defenders have often cited jobs as

But as the Solar Foundation's report details, measures to bolster cleaner
energy are also creating jobs elsewhere. Over time, that may end up
creating a bigger constituency for further clean-energy policies (though
likely in different regions). A US solar industry that employs as many
people as the influential coal industry could have a lot more sway — in
Washington and elsewhere.

It's still unclear how that will all shake out, however. Right now, the
solar industry is still booming thanks to a 30 percent federal tax credit
<http://www.seia.org/policy/finance-tax/solar-investment-tax-credit> for
rooftop solar systems. But that tax credit is set to expire in 2016 unless
Congress extends it in some shape or form. And if the credit *does* lapse,
the solar boom is likely to slow (though it probably won't stop entirely in
states that are sunny and have high electricity costs, like California).

It'll be worth watching how the solar industry deals with that over the
next few years — and whether all those jobs translate into extra political
clout or not.

-----

** *Note on numbers:* Over at Climate Desk, Tim McDonnell argued
<http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-coal-economy-jobs/> that solar
employs *twice* as many people as coal, although he's only counting coal
miners. I've also folded in 2006 estimates
<http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Coal_and_jobs_in_the_United_States#cite_note-15>
of people employed in transporting coal and working at coal power plants,
which brings coal roughly even with solar.

Though this estimate is hardly perfect. As Jonathan Adler pointed out
<https://twitter.com/jadler1969/status/556896674883194880> on Twitter, my
coal numbers may be an undercount, since they don't include people working
on things like regulatory compliance. That's fair enough. The broader point
still holds: The solar industry and coal industry employ a roughly
comparable number of people despite the fact that the coal industry
generates a much, much bigger fraction of the country's electricity.
Further reading

Solar power is now growing so fast
<http://www.vox.com/2014/9/29/6849723/solar-power-net-metering-utilities-fight-states>
that older energy companies are trying to stop it

Solar power keeps getting cheaper
<http://www.vox.com/2014/10/16/6987915/solar-power-cheaper-balance-of-systems-costs>
— though not for the reasons you'd expect

Solar power is contagious
<http://www.vox.com/2014/10/24/7059995/solar-power-is-contagious-neighbor-effects-panels-installation>:
Installing panels often means your neighbors will too


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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