#1
Post rating: +
In Germany, which is basically the leading edge of solar technology, the average solar installation is 6 KW and takes 10 hour of electrician labor to install. Even if the US were to lower its labor requirements to this level, this would still create immense employment opportunities for electricians if solar power was used to supply the entire country. Furthermore, almost all the gains in solar costs have been in hardware costs, not operating efficiency or installation costs.

Let's Do The Math.

(1) There are currently 600K electricians in the US.
(2) In Germany it takes 10 hours to install 6KW (US panels take much more labor for various reasons)
(3) There are 8 useable solar hours in a day, 365 days a year, 10 years between part replacements, 30% performance ratio
(4) The US consumes 25,000 TWh annually
(5) Electricians work about 2000 hours a year

The math:

(6) Dividing out (2) gives us 600 watts per hour of labor
(7) Multiplying out (4) gives us 8760 watt hours of use per installed watt
(8) Dividing (4) by (7) gives us 3E12 watts to install to power the entire US with solar
(9) Dividing (8)/(6)/(5) gives us 2.4 million electricians needed
(10) Finally, dividing (9) by (1) shows that this is four times the number of electricians in the US

This demand growth for electrical engineers as fossil fuels deplete may sound too good to be true- and maybe it is. Perhaps the demand for new electricians will not be met and the reluctance of Gen Y to get community college level job training will doom Western Civilization to plummeting energy production and total collapse.

But look on the bright side- if you get in on the renewables train early, there will be no shortage of work. And just maybe, with 100% sunny days 365 days a year, massive technological advance to bring installation costs down to German levels and 400% cloning of electricians and electrical engineers, it might even turn out well!

Edited by Lucille ()

#2
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
pro IRL strat. will vouch for
#3
Post rating: +
The other thing is that the US energy consumption is artificially low because it outsources manufacturing. If you consider the consumption needed to maintain current living standards then you'd need like twice as many electricians.
#4
Post rating: ~
So given that we really need 5 million electricians, 3/4 of the labor is required is still unskilled nonelectricians. This puts us up to 20 million people. Twice that since not everyone works full time. That's like 40 million people, a third of the overall labor force and a fiftyfold increase in the size of the construction industry.

We can get an idea of the wage adjustments that would be required to incentivize shifting people into this one narrow sector of the economy (assuming we don't just enslave all the NEETs and force them to sustain industrial civilization). First let's assume the incentive to enter a field is proportional to the natural log of wages, to account for diminishing returns. Then let's assume a labor supply elasticity of 1, which is unrealistic because inelasticities will take it below that.

So in order to achieve a fiftyfold increase in construction workers, that would require a 2.7^50 increase in wages, or equivalently, a massive reduction in everyone else's wages to move people into construction.

Industrial civilization will be impossible to sustain post-oil without slave labor, this is why ecostalinists have a point (we need the government to enslave people to ensure a green energy future).
#5
Post rating: ~
trotsky advocated a labour army before stalin

trots 1, stalinists 0
#6
Post rating: ~
I meant to downvote but... I couldn't bring myself to do it.

I'm too nice.



You have just been assigned the Troll Alert rank, thanks to a tip off which must remain anonymous, regardless of the fact that he was a troll as well.

Know that evidence has come to the fore, and that members of this community will know look at your posts with due suspicion.

Thanks for playing,
Wheylous
#7
Post rating: ~
Note that there is nothing actually leftist about malthusianism. There is nothing in "the oil is going to run out and we're all going to die" that is an argument for more welfare or even less economic growth (economic growth is very effective at reducing fertility). The only thing malthusianism does is satisfy leftists' misanthrophy and self-destructiveness.
#8
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: ~

Lucille posted:

Note that there is nothing actually leftist about malthusianism. There is nothing in "the oil is going to run out and we're all going to die" that is an argument for more welfare or even less economic growth (economic growth is very effective at reducing fertility). The only thing malthusianism does is satisfy leftists' misanthrophy and self-destructiveness.

you must be a hit at parties.

#9
Post rating: ~
I hope not. I went to a party once, it was stupid and awkward and alcohol tastes bad.
#10
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
how do i beomce electrical engineer
#11
Post rating: ~
That's not where the money is. The money is in canned food and ammunition.
#12
Post rating: ~
lol @ solar advocates pointing out "Solar creates more jobs per dollar than any other energy source!" as if it's a good thing.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5821

Renewables tend to be a more labor-intensive energy source than the still-dominant fossil fuels, which rely heavily on expensive pieces of pro­duction equipment. A transition toward renewables thus promises job gains. Even in the absence of such a transition, growing automa­tion and corporate consolidation are already translating into steadily fewer jobs in the oil, natural gas, and coal industries-sometimes even in the face of expanding production. Many hundreds of thousands of coal mining jobs have been shed in China, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and South Africa in the last decade or two.4 In the United States, coal output rose by almost one third during the past two decades, yet employment has been cut in half.5



I guess wind is a bit better, it supplies ten times as much power as solar with about the same employment, but that's still not efficient enough when you need 40 million solar workers to power the country.

Also wind power crowds itself out.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/wind-power-not-enough-to-affect-global-climate

At maximum levels of power generation, there would be substantial climate effects from wind harvesting. But the study found that the climate effects of extracting wind energy at the level of current global demand (about 18 terawatts) would be small, as long as the turbines were spread out and not clustered in just a few regions. At the level of global energy demand, wind turbines might affect surface temperatures by about 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit and affect precipitation by about 1 percent. Overall, the environmental impacts would not be substantial.



If the <1% global power being supplied by wind increases precipitation by 1% that seems like there's steeply diminishing returns.

Edited by Lucille ()

#13
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
how do i become a solar electrical engineer
#14
Post rating: ~
You don't need to do any of that. All you need to understand is why you should never take Mustang posts seriously.

Malthusians like to pretend that the collapse is going to happen suddenly and catastrophically to keep their little extremist dicks hard. And who knows, that may happen.

But normally, extrapolating out resource curves into infinity ignores counteracting factors. As energy costs go up, people have fewer kids and population goes down.

Oil isn't going to run out all at once. It'll be decades of slow deteroiration. Cost of living and unemployment shocks will eventually take down fertility rates and population will reach a new equilibrium at a comfortable level.

The aggregate resources are not the main thing. The main thing is available resources relative to the population. You can support any living standard, its just a matter of the population density and available land. Things that are impractical on a large scale, like hydro or wind, would make sense eventually as population fell.

Maybe "post-capitalism" or whatever you imagine that to mean will happen. But it's more likely nothing interesting will. It'll be like today, just with fewer people.
#15
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: +

Lucille posted:

You don't need to do any of that. All you need to understand is why you should never take Mustang posts seriously.



i dont ever take anything seriously and its destroying my life

#16
Post rating: ~
Can't help you with that. Try getting a job or something.
#17
political car tune
Post rating: ~
One job just won't cut it. Never be not working
#18
Post rating: ~
#19
Post rating: ~
http://nawindpower.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.11087

EWEA: Europe Faces Severe Shortage Of Skilled Wind Energy Workers

http://ussolarinstitute.com/solar-boot-camps-no-longer-sufficient-for-training-a-green-army/

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2012/11/the-solar-industry-may-soon-face-a-shortage-of-skilled-labor

The growth of the solar industry may soon face the reality of not having enough skilled workers to satisfy demand, suggests a recent report by The Solar Foundation and the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP). Despite a dragging economy overall, installed solar capacity has increased dramatically in the past few years. In 2011 alone, the cumulative installed solar capacity in the United States nearly doubled from 2,095 MW to 3,950 MW. Should the industry continue along the base-line forecast, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) forecasts that 75% of the U.S. solar market will attain grid-parity by 2015. This could unlock even higher levels of adoption and create a real distance between the demand and supply of solar installation professionals.

.

It's happening.
#20
Post rating: ~
LOL when western civilization collapses because of something stupid and asinine like not enough people installing solar panels.
#21
Post rating: ~
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/3/7/wind-energy-limited-study/

Wind power and wind farms may not be capable of producing as much energy as previously believed, according to a paper co-authored by Harvard scientist David W. Keith.

Keith, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, co-published the paper on Feb. 25 in the online scientific journal Environmental Research Letters with Amanda S. Adams, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Their study examined the long-range effects of one wind farm on another. The spacing between turbines is critical to each of their individual functioning, because a turbine placed directly behind another turbine cannot spin at full capacity and is therefore less efficient and able to put out less energy. This phenomenon is caused by the fact that in order to operate and move its blades, a wind turbine takes mechanical energy out of the wind passing through it. As a result, the speed of wind that has already passed through another turbine is lower when it hits the next in a series of the devices.

Therefore, when a wind farm becomes large enough, according to the study, it can have a larger impact on the energy-producing capacity of surrounding wind farms. Due to these diminishing returns, Keith said future efforts to scale up the amount of wind power produced on earth will result in each new wind farm producing less power relative to its land area than previously expected.

Keith said that past investigations into the impact of one turbine on another did not take into account large-scale decreases in wind speeds that arise from entire wind farms essentially removing energy from the wind.

“The old-style idea was that you just add it up,” Keith said. “You calculated the wind at the turbines around the world, and you added up all those things as if they work independently.”

But even with diminishing power output, covering vast areas of land with turbines could potentially provide for power demands in the U.S., Keith said. However, Keith warned, the large number of turbines could come with other costs and consequences.

Keith explained that although an individual wind turbine may be efficient, turbines in large numbers are both expensive to build and relatively inefficient when functioning collectively.

If advances cannot make turbines more cost-efficient, Keith said, a significant increase in the amount of power produced by wind will not be financially sensible.

Beyond monetary concerns, the paper also emphasizes that the implementation of wind power on a large scale can have a significant impact on the local environment. Keith said these effects will become significant and visible “well before” wind power supplies a third of U.S. primary energy

While Keith said he believes wind power is a good alternative to coal or petroleum, expanding wind power to the scale of either energy resource would result in changing temperatures on Earth, which could impact a myriad of issues like crop growth. Land use also becomes a serious issue as wind farms become larger leading to the a need to build access roads to the turbines, Keith said.

Keith said that although he would not totally discourage further research into wind power, he thinks people should put less effort into its development relative to other alternative energies, such as solar and nuclear power, which have more potential to offer a sustainable solution to energy demands.

“We have to think analytically with numbers about what the consequences are of scaling up...and realize there are some we wouldn’t want to scale even if we could,” Keith said.

Keith said he thinks policymakers should take into account existing research when allocating funds for energy development in the future.

“This is a game of moral responsibility and political decision-making,” Keith said. “This is not some kind of passive guess about what happens. We’re part of the guess. We need to make political decisions about what we want to have happen, not guess.”
#22
Post rating: ~
sure there are individual problems with wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric dams but taken together they would be fine, the real issue is that solving energy problems would require more government intervention than liberals will allow. fossil fuel derived electricity is so cheap from the negative externalities that switching from them to greener sources isn't profitable for individual firms even when it would be a massive benefit for society.

oh right, i can't say exactly how much better off society would be therefore the only applicable measurement is profit. thanks libertarians.
#23
Post rating: ~

sure there are individual problems with wind, solar, geothermal and hydroelectric dams but taken together they would be fine, the real issue is that solving energy problems would require more government intervention than liberals will allow.



It would require slavery, like I said, yes. Or increased inequality to incentivize people moving into solar.

I'm already trolling CleanTechnica on this.

#24
Post rating: ~
some kind of national service in a labour force (like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevin_Boys) would probably be defined as slavery by the libertarians you hang out with now, but they have a fallacious understanding of human rights so i reject their arguments.
#25
Post rating: ~
Capitalism is slavery anyway, why are we mincing words? Thatcher's UK = morally equivalent to Roman Empire.
#26
Post rating: ~
The decline in performance with age is considerably greater when capacity weights are used. This implies that the performance of large wind farms declines more rapidly than that of smaller ones. From age 3 onwards the confidence intervals for the two age-performance curves do not overlap, so that it is unlikely that the difference between the two curves arises merely by chance. The normalised load factor per MW of capacity falls to about 7% at age 10 and 3.5% at age 15. With such low levels of performance it seems very unlikely that large wind farms will continue in operation beyond 10 years of age, with a strong likelihood of re-powering at that point. The consequence is that large scale reliance upon wind power seems likely to involve a regular – and costly – commitment to upgrading major components of the wind turbines.

http://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/280/ref.hughes.19.12.12.pdf

The Performance of Wind Farms
in the United Kingdom and
Denmark
Gordon Hughes

Wind turbines only last about 10 years, not the 25-30 normally quoted.

Edited by Lucille ()

#27
Post rating: ~
Don't feel obligated to respond to any of this, I'm just dumping stuff here.

On top of all previous, lower power consumption means less manufacturing productivity, which reduces the labor available for installation. This causes a spiral.
#28
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: +

Lucille posted:

While Keith said he believes wind power is a good alternative to coal or petroleum, expanding wind power to the scale of either energy resource would result in changing temperatures on Earth,



#29
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: ~
vertical axis wind turbines are smaller, cheaper, lighter (less inertia to overcome), can be spaced much more closely together, and are overall 10x more efficient than horizontal axis turbines. as always, the problems with alternative energy are due to current, non-optimal implementations and not anything inherent to the overall technology itself
#30
Post rating: ~
Are you being sarcastic? VAWTs topple over, they have altitude limits which make them "efficient" per height but useless.

Renewables don't work period. Nothing works, nuclear runs out in like 25 years if everyone uses it, in soviet russia the oil peaks you.

Edited by Lucille ()

#31
Post rating: +
i would take my trash out but the sun is going to burn out in a few million years so what's the point really?
#32
Post rating: +
why even get out of bed, entropy is just going to increase until all matter and energy is equally spread across the infinite void
#33
Post rating: ~
Oil will still outlast our posting lives. The problems kick in around 2100 when it runs out.

//just storing stuff

http://www.bls.gov/green/wind_energy/

http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/naics4_236200.htm

Last year the wind industry built 10,000 turbines with about 10,000 construction workers. Given these last 10 years, that implies 10 turbines/worker. Given that we need 4 million turbines for a decent infrastructure that would require 400K workers.

There are about 700K in the nonresidential construction industry, with 400K construction workers. That would be necessary just to build turbines.
#34
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: +
build turbines into existing structures. build everything into existing structures, then everyone destroy all existing structures and stop existing
#35
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating: +
erect portable ground level turbines at the expanding edges of black neighborhoods to harvest the eddy currents from white flight
#36
Post rating: ~
Was that a sarcasm? Sorry, I'm not good at noticing sarcasms.
#37
[account deactivated]
#38
Post rating: ~
That's the most legit thing you've ever said here. If the world population was reduced to a few million people we could live off compost and hydropower and barely have to work. Of course that will never happen and the coming centuries will see the world reduced to medieval living conditions.
#39
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +

Lucille posted:

the coming centuries will see the world reduced to medieval living conditions.

maybe the catholic church will make a big comeback. that'd be great.

#40
Post rating: ~
I've already proven that it will.

Except in this case I'm starting to believe my own trolling because the countries with high wind adoption rates like Denmark and Germany have stagnated and are facing labor shortages already.