Coal news and updates

Putting solar power on rooftops is pretty labor-intensive. You need people to design and manufacture the panels. Then people to market the panels to homes and businesses. Then people to come and install them.That's a lot of jobs. Even though solar power provides just a tiny fraction of electricity in the United States — about 0.4 percent — the solar industry now employs roughly 174,000 people, according to a survey from the non-profit Solar Foundation. And the industry is expected to add another 36,000 jobs in 2015, as rooftop installations keep rising at a rapid clip.

 

To put this in perspective, 174,000 is roughly comparable to the number of workers employed by the US coal industry, if you add up all the workers in coal mining (about 80,000), plus coal transportation and coal power plants.** Yet coal still provides 39 percent of America's electricity — far, far more than solar does.

 

Now, mind you, this isn't a perfect comparison. Solar is still growing, which means there's a lot of installation work, whereas no one's building new coal plants in the US anymore. (Quite the contrary, many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas.) Still, it's interesting to look at the two industries side-by-side.

 

Are all these solar jobs a good thing?

 

There are a few different ways to look at the boom in solar jobs.

 

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. And these are relatively 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.A more pessimistic way to look at these numbers, however, is to point out that solar power looks like a relatively inefficient way of creating energy. As one 2012 University of Tennessee study found, it takes far more manpower to generate one megawatt-hour of electricity from solar than it does from any other energy source.

 

 

 

Source: http://www.vox.com/