A wind turbine blade is unveiled during the opening of the Vestas blade factory in Windsor, Colo., Wednesday, March 5, 2008. (Jack Dempsey/AP/FILE)
Does wind power really provide more jobs than coal?
By Eoin O'Carroll | 01.31.09
Earlier this week, Fortune’s eco-blog, Green Wombat, ran a story under the headline, “Wind jobs outstrip the coal industry.”
Blogger Todd Woody cites new report from the American Wind Energy Association that about 85,000 people are now employed by the wind power industry, up from 50,000 a year ago. Mr. Woody then says that “the coal industry employs about 81,000 workers,” citing a 2007 report from the Department of Energy.
Woody calls this comparison “a talking point in the green jobs debate.”
The story was republished on the Huffington Post, cited by Mother Jones magazine, and has been bouncing around the green blogosphere for the past few days.
But it’s a bogus comparison. According to the wind energy report, those 85,000 jobs in wind power are as “varied as turbine component manufacturing, construction and installation of wind turbines, wind turbine operations and maintenance, legal and marketing services, and more.” The 81,000 coal jobs counted by the Department of Energy are only miners. Their figure excludes those who haul the coal around the country, as well as those who work in coal power plants.
To be fair, Woody’s lede does say that “[t]he wind industry now employs more people than coal mining in the United States.” But his story then immediately abandons this distinction, and then goes on to characterize those 81,000 jobs as comprising the total employment of the coal industry.
So how many jobs does coal provide in the United States? I called up the National Coal Council, whose site will blast Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” as soon as it loads, and the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the lobbying group behind most of those ubiquitous “clean coal” ads, to see if they could give me a ballpark figure. They haven’t gotten back to me yet.
SourceWatch, a Wikipedia-like site run by the Center for Media and Democracy that monitors industry lobbying groups and PR firms, attempts to tally all those who mine coal, who haul it by rail, barge, and truck, and who operate and maintain coal-fired power plants. The writers estimate that “the coal industry directly provides an approximate total of 174,000 blue-collar, full-time, permanent jobs in the U.S.”
But even comparing that to the number of wind power jobs is a bit spurious. If we’re going to count those who build wind turbines, shouldn’t we also count those who build the coal plants? The same should go for the lawyers and marketing people, too.
A 1995 factbook by the Department of Energy cites 1994 study conducted for the National Coal Association, which said that the coal industry’s workforce, which at the time was said to be 136,000, was indirectly responsible for another 1.4 million jobs.
While it’s encouraging that wind industry jobs grew by 70 percent last year, it’s probably a good thing that, all else being equal, they don’t currently employ more people than the coal industry does. After all, according to the US Department of Energy’s Renewable Energy Data Book [PDF], wind provides only about 2 percent of America’s electricity. Coal provides half. If it really took that many people to provide so little wind energy, it would never become competitive with fossil fuels.
Update: It appears that the Green Wombat has corrected its story, although the misleading headline remains the same.
<< Montana’s got wind, needs power lines | MainComments
2. Argem | 01.31.09
The wind industry is much smaller than the coal industry so it’s no surprise it employs fewer people. In addition, many of the wind turbines in the country come from foreign manufacturers.
It’s alright for wind energy to be people intensive as opposed to the coal industry because wind has one crucial advantage: the fuel cost is free.
It’s also virtually non-polluting compared to coal.
3. Frida Payle | 01.31.09
Another factor that weakens the claim is that most of the construction jobs were temporary: clearing and excavating sites and building roads.
Interestingly, there is no claim that wind jobs are replacing coal jobs, whereas that is selling point number one in terms of energy production.
4. Art | 01.31.09
It only takes a couple people to transport a unit train from Wyoming to wherever. Conversely, most of the wind energy materials travel by truck at some point (as well as ship and train) which probably takes more people. I’m not so sure your figuring is quite right either.
5. Mary E. | 01.31.09
I don’t know the exact figures for comparison of the various energy sources, I have seen the numbers given by the department of Energy and Wind, Solar, Biomass and Geothermal will never be competitive with energy expend to acquire the same amount of energy for coal, oil and gas until technology changes to bring down the costs of renewables. Its unlikely that will happen before we run out of hydrocarbon fuels. The real problem lies in the U.S. infrastructure used to refine and transmit energy. It restricts us now in times of high usage, calamities of mother nature and economic price. So why deal with this antiquated system when we will not have those hydrocarbon fuels? Instead lets develop a system that takes the pressure off the current system and looks into the future of clean more efficient sources.
6. John T | 01.31.09
Good try to point out bias logic from the pro-wind folks. I am sure that a like-for-like comparison of wind versus coal power plants, including design, build, operate, maintain, and fuel, the number-of-job comparison would be vastly different.
But, that misses the point. The object of power plants is to make electricity in an economic and socially-responsible manner. Economic electric power has a far larger impact on jobs than any job difference from how the electricity is made.
The addition of the “socially-responsible” qualifier covers whether society wishes to penalize or promote one manner of making electricity versus another. It is something that should be discussed, debated, and ultimately, voted on, all is a transparent manner.
Idealistic, perhaps, but the new administration can give idealism a chance.
7. Steve W | 01.31.09
If 2% of our energy consumption is from 81,000 workers then how many more workers can we expect should wind reach 50% of energy consumption? What’s the potential employment from wind energy industries if we are successful in making the transition from coal to wind? And even more to the point, if we retain a significant reliance on domestic coal plus add new wind sources, we’ll be supplanting reliance on foreign energy sources and thus bringing jobs home. Isn’t that a big part of what we’re trying to do? Is the tradeoff between domestic coal and wind? or is it between domestic sources (including wind and coal) and foreign oil?
I read though the 600+ pages of the House stimulus bill and see many components that will support this transition. I feel we’re moving the trajectory in the right direction.
8. Mike | 01.31.09
The mining industry numbers do not include anyone that manufactures the mining equipment or suppliers that manufacture the roof bolts, rail, conveyor belt and structure, tires, and explosives etc. that keeps the operations running at high productivity.
9. Brother Jones | 01.31.09
This is why I love the Christian Science Monitor: Objectivity and the ability to hold both sides of an issue to task for their attempts at propaganda. The more we deal with reality, the more change we can effect in this world. Peace & blessings.
10. Bruce Lierman | 01.31.09
So with all those people employed, and all those claims of “clean coal”, why is there not yet so much as one commercial scale, modern “clean coal technology” plant operating in this country?
And if we’re going down the road of identifying all the pros and cons, do we also get to discount the value of coal by all the other fossil fuels it takes to fill those coal trains and send them around the country?
Which job would you rather have - working in a coal mine or making erecting, and maintaining windmills? Which production facility would you prefer to live next to?
11. Zig | 01.31.09
The cost of all products or services indicate how many people are employed for that product or service. People are the only receivers of money.
12. Cedric Dennett | 01.31.09
I have followed the national discussion on the so called ‘clean energy’ options for generating electrical power and the various pros and cons for investing in what the talking heads would all have us believe is the right direction for the economy and for the country in creating new jobs and lessening our dependence on foreign oil.
The installed electrical generating capacity of this country is almost 90 % invested in coal, nuclear. and gas fueled power plants which transmit and distribute the power over a very old but nevertheless very sophisticated interconnected transmission power grid. The government would be well advised to invest and upgrade this infrastructure before they invest in adding miniscule amounts of power generation to the installed capacity by ‘green technology’. It will matter little in the over arching scheme of things including our national defence if large amounts of money are invested in green technology at the expense of what many experts believe has for all too long been a neglected area and is a serious achilles heel ! Large power blackouts and failures will be the result.
Reliability of electrical power is the only game in town in the final analysis whether generated by clean, green or dirty means !
If I had one bit of advice for the politicians I would strongly recommend that some visionary would harness and fund a Manhattan project to work on and bring in to commercial production a competitive fuel cell, one for every home to provide cheap economical and environmentally friendly electricity. Modular grouping of standardized fuel cell units could then be constructed and connected to become mini power plants of the future.
13. Sean Wise | 02.01.09
I think the most compelling data point is that wind power provides 2% of the nations energy while coal provides 50% at similar employment levels. However, I noticed in the DoE document that they only talk about capacity. Coal plants typically deliver about 75% of their rated capacity while wind installations only deliver at 25% at best and under 20% is a more realistic number. If the 50% and 2% numbers for coal and wind respectively are based on capacity rather than on power delivered from the installation, we are not talking a 25 to 1 ratio for coal vs. wind, we are looking at a 100 to 1 ratio of coal power generation vs. wind power generation.
14. Robert Moen | 02.01.09
I don’t prefer coal over wind, but I do prefer the truth so I can think through the issues myself. I research energy issues for http://www.energyplanusa.com and can tell you that American Wind Energy Association over-and-over stretches the truth. They are a lobby group whose stated mission is to ‘promote wind power growth’. They are not about truth.
15. Snake Oil | 02.01.09
Wind energy is an expensive and unreliable option for electricity production. The addition of wind power to the grid will guarantee the construction of fossil fuel powered generating stations to balance the fluctuating load created by wind turbines.
It sounds good at first but if you do some research you will see wind generated power is scam on the taxpayer and ratepayer. The developer benefits and maybe some landowners the rest of us will pay for it for a long,long time.
Turbines are remotely monitored and provide little local employment. The local cement plant gets some business and most of construction workers are specialists from away. Taxes to municipality increase which the development companies promise to pay for the landowners. Sure hope your developer doesn’t go bankrupt.
Wind energy doesn’t survive a cost benefit analysis. Just because we wish it would isn’t a good reason to invest.
It’s not politically correct but nuclear power is the only way of meeting our electricity needs without producing greenhouse gases.
16. Ted Nace | 02.02.09
Wind capacity reached 25,170 MW in 2008.
http://www.awea.org/newsroom/releases/wind_energy_growth2008_27Jan09.html
Coal capacity was 309,913 MW in 2007.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Coal-fired_power_plant_capacity_and_generation
17. davefordemocracy | 02.02.09
I caught that too. Thanks for doing the hard work of looking into it. One would think that, for all the noise about jobs, the coal industry would have some hard numbers and comprehensive breakdowns about the number of people it employs.
18. Dan | 02.17.09
If it is true that it takes so many people to provide wind energy, is it not also true that the more wind we produce the more jobs we will have? To compare energies journalists should also talk in terms of jobs/kw. And how come nobody wants to quantify the social/environmental costs of coal in journalism? And how much do we subsidize the coal industry?
As Al Gore often says, “American taxpayers are subsidizing coal being sent to China to be burnt in dirty coal plants and fry the planet.” There’s a lot of negative costs wound up in that cycle that offset any jobs in the coal industry.
19. Jerry | 04.18.09
If you check the numbers, you will see that it takes 7 times more people to produce a MW from green windpower than it does from coal. That would be like General Motors hiring 7 times more people to make the same number of cars. Kind makes you wonder if green power is going to cost 7 times as much. In addition to the green jobs you can add back in the coal or natural gas power systems because you still need the on-demand backup since the wind doesn’t blow 24 hours a day - even in the central US where the highest wind resources are.
20. Uncle B | 04.19.09
As the coal runs out, and automation takes over, fewer jobs in coal! When the wind stops, no more development needed, all those folks layed off! Catastrophic! Unless we get written guarantees for wind to continue, all investment bets are off! America cannot place it’s future in the hands of the unknown, and must develop Nuclear power, the fuel supply of which, is finite, well defined and known. Taking bets on Solar are the same sort of foolhardy trust in the unknown. The sun may stop at any time! and we will be left holding the bag! With coal nuclear, and oil we know exactly where the end is, what the consequences are, and we have them on paper, signed by engineers, a certain thing. Hydro, Geothermal, Wave and Tidal technologies may quit at any, undefined time, rendering investments valueless! Coal and nuclear produce wastes we cannot handle. We need to export our problems to Africa like France does! a simple elegant solution, leaving future generations to solve. Solar, Wind, Wave, Hydro, Tidal and geothermal Power are not certain, fact of life, definable on paper things, and not worth a [word we don’t use here removed] cent! Stick to what we know, no matter if they are not perfect.
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1. frank m | 01.31.09
Wind is providing new jobs . Ignoring all of the mountain tops removed and slag lakes of polluted toxic waste and the mercury polution in fish thru out the oceans and the CO2 issue the coal industry has been around a lot longer and would of course be employeeing currently more people. We need to build the wind industry looking forward not backwards. Wind is competitive now and will remain competitive if we have the same subsidies as coal has had for the last 50 years. check out the coal subsidies.