The Clean Energy Jobs We Need Right Now

Where's the future of clean energy technology? Bob Herbert wrote a piece today at the New York Times that profiles a leading light of alternative energy research [1], Stan Ovshinsky.

Ovshinsky is behind thin-film photovoltaics, a solar power newcomer with a lot of promise, and the nickel metal hydride batteries in widespread use already. But he has a problem: he can't get much funding to develop his ideas about how to bring the cost of solar power below the cost of coal, even as coal always gets funding [2]. His problem is our problem.

As of 2008, world energy consumption [3] averaged 15 terawatts (1.504×10¹³ watts) per year.

In recent years, about one percent of that energy has been produced by renewable energy, excluding hydroelectric power, while over 13 terawatts are produced by oil, natural gas and coal. Two tenths of a percent of the 120,000 terawatts of solar energy that fall on the planet, or 5 percent of the 300 terawatts of wind energy blowing across the surface of the planet, could replace fossil and nuclear energy. But replacing even 20 percent (pdf) [4] of the 13 terawatts worth of installed distribution, extraction and generation capacity is a huge, if worthy and necessary, effort.

(And yes, I know I do go on about this, the scientists who put together the IPCC reports are finding that real world events are following their worst-case scenarios [5]. Oceans are rising and ice is melting much faster than they thought was highly probable only a few years ago. The faster our energy transition happens, the better.)

While all this good work is waiting [6] to be done, youth unemployment is at ridiculous levels [7] (seriously, fix this, or those kids are never moving out of the basement), job prospects for those with a high school education [8] continue to get more dismal, and Speaker Pelosi is worried about a repeat of the 1930s without serious job creation efforts [9].

Pelosi's right to be worried about current unemployment and job creation figures, but I do hope the jobs she and the rest of the federal government focus on creating are family wage jobs doing useful work. Without creating family wage jobs, particularly in unionized sectors of the economy, such as manufacturing, there's going to be no concerted pushback on the favoring of wealth over work [10] and serious inequality will continue worsening.

As they say in the 2008/2009 State of Working America [11]:

The weakening of unionism’s wage impact had an even larger effect on blue-collar workers and on the wage gap between blue-collar and white-collar workers. The 43.1% unionization rate among blue-collar workers in 1978 and their 26.6% union wage premium boosted blue-collar wages by 11.5%, thereby closing the blue-collar/white-collar wage gap by 11.3 percentage points in that year. The union impact on this differential declined as unionization and the union wage premium declined, such that unionism reduced the blue-collar/white-collar differential by 4.1 rather than 11.3 percentage points in 2005, a 7.2 percentage-point weakening. This lessened effect of unionism can account for 65% of the 11.1 percentage-point growth of the blue-collar/white-collar wage gap over the 1978-2005 period. It was primarily driven by the enormous decline of unionism among blue-collar men, from 43.1% in 1978 to just 19.2% in 2005. In that nearly 30-year period unionism among blue-collar workers lost much of its ability to set wage patterns.

Unions reduce wage inequalities because they raise wages more at the bottom and in the middle of the wage scale than at the top. Lower-wage, middle-wage, blue-collar, and high-school-educated workers are also more likely than high-wage, whitecollar, and college-educated workers to be represented by unions. These two factors—the greater union representation and the larger union wage impact for low- and mid-wage workers—are key to unionization’s role in reducing wage inequalities.

The larger union wage premium for those with low wages, in lower-paid occupations, and with less education is shown in Table 3.36. For instance, the union wage premium for blue-collar workers in 1997, 23.3%, was far larger than the 2.2% union wage premium for white-collar workers. Likewise, the 1997 union wage premium for high school graduates, 20.8%, was much higher than the 5.1% premium for college graduates. The union wage premium for those with a high school degree or less, at 35.5%, is significantly greater than the 24.5% premium for all workers.

Some help is coming though, through the smart grid technology projects [12] that will be funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aka, the stimulus bill. The projects will be funded with $3.4 billion in grants for monitoring systems, better transmissions lines, smart meters that tell people how much energy they're using in real time, and storage technologies that allow for easier integration of (and higher demand for) wind and solar power generation.

The Department of Energy expects consumers to save $20.4 bn on their electricity bills, while the monitoring and transmission upgrades will be able to make a serious dent in the 67 percent of generated power lost to grid inefficiency [13] and poor management.

That will save everyone money and create a lot of family wage jobs. When it comes to installation and equipment manufacture, plenty of the work will be in union jobs. Overall, this should create more opportunities for Mr. Ovshinsky and the country's frustrated jobseekers, then his solutions can be our solutions.