Is the renewable energy industry an employment program? – Watts Up With That?

– For the most part, it is.

By Julius Sanks

Milton Freeman famously, and perhaps contrived, upon seeing a canal dug by hand rather than with modern equipment, is said to have remarked: “Oh, I think you’re building a canal . If that’s the job you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”

Whether the story is true or not, we are now seeing something similar in real life. In Grist, the journalist Kate Yoder crows that young people are said to be heading towards renewable energy jobs rather than working for evil fossil fuel companies. Possibly – the evidence she provides is rather sketchy – but the one statistic she provides is interesting. According to her source E2.org, in 2021, the United States employs about 3.2 million people in “clean energy” jobs, and this number is 3.5 times higher than in fossil fuel jobs. Doing the math, that’s about 915,000 people working in fossils. I find that hard to believe.

The E2 report made me wonder about energy production and the labor involved. After all, labor is a big part of the cost of any industry. Renewable energy advocates often rattle about how industries they like are developing, but rarely compare their industries with competitors. Since E2 is talking about jobs I decided to look at the actual energy production and labor to get it. This bypasses work using, but not producing, energy; for example, building an electric vehicle or a “smart” transmission.

All E2 did was analyze a Department of Energy (DoE) Employment Report and publish part of its content. The E2 report includes work that doesn’t compare directly to fossil energy production, but doesn’t appear to do the same on the fossil side. For example, E2 cites Energy Star production. A device doesn’t care how it uses the generated electricity. So E2’s analysis compares “apple and orange”.

The so-called non-renewable sources provide most of our energy. Figure 1 is a US Energy Information Chart (EIA). It doesn’t take any math to see renewable energy – that’s the term I’ll use from now on, as opposed to “clean” – energy that is part of fossil production.

A British unit of heat is a standard unit used to measure energy. By definition, it is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of liquid water by 1 degree F at the temperature at which water has the greatest density (about 39 degrees F). That’s not a lot of heat, so energy production is usually reported in British thermal units (BTUs), or “quads”.

We can address productivity by comparing British thermal units (BTUs) produced with the number of employees in that industry. To do that, we need to know our energy consumption by source. These units are in trillions of BTUs (“quads”).

Figure 1 Made in the USA, downloaded from the EIA website.

Are clean energy workers building the grid, or running a shovel job program, or maybe spoons? Or are non-renewable industries doing something like that? Are these renewable energy quads produced more efficiently than fossils?

To find out, we have to determine how much energy each worker produces for each source. One might think it’s a simple comparison. For the most part, that’s true. But that’s not always the case. Although the EIA reports both production and manpower involved, for some renewables this report does not use the same terms. Your taxes at work. The workforce report also distinguishes between electricity and fuel production. Some other considerations:

• Biomass, lumped together in the production process, occurs in five types of labor: electricity and four fuels: corn ethanol, biomass, other ethanol and other biomass. I lumped the staff together.

• Natural gas plant liquid (NGPL) is reported separately for the production process, but is pooled with all other natural gas for employee reporting. At least, I think that’s what the government did. So that’s what I did.

• There are two types of hydroelectricity (hydroelectricity): traditional and low impact. “Low impact” in this context means a plant that is less destructive to the environment than a common tree. Low impact plants have much lower capacity than conventional. As seen in Figure 1, hydropower production refers only to conventional hydropower. DoE doesn’t report low-impact production, but for some reason it does report personnel. The Low Impact Hydropower Institute (LIHI) there is a spreadsheet listing 176 “certified” sites with an average annual output of about 555 billion BTUs. That’s 0.0555 Quads. No wonder the Department of Education did not report it, but why did it report the payroll? I am using LIHI production and DoE personnel.

• Finally, another technology that reports EIAs on the HR side is combined heat and power (CHP). These plants are advertised as having higher thermodynamic efficiency than conventional plants. Again, the EIA does not report production; but, just to keep the life of an analyst interesting, combine CHP personnel with whatever fuel the site uses. I did not find any figures for CHP power production. However, Statista has data in terms of the number of CHP plants: 200. The number of these plants has gradually decreased from 267 in 2010. Most of these plants use natural gas. Find the energy report 9,352 power plants in the US. With no identifiable production or personnel data and a declining interest in technology, I’m dismissing CHP as a separate industry.

So, digging through lengthy government reports and analyzing some numbers, we end up with Table 1. I’ve added some categories that aren’t shown in Figure 1, because of the reports. EIAs include them. Table 1 ratio of energy produced to total number of employees for each sector.

Table 1 Energy produced per employee by source, 2021

Now, that’s a lot of really big numbers. To make the situation easier to understand, here is a chart based on Table 1 data, with energy sources sorted by annual output per employee in the industry. Figure 2 divides the amount of energy each industry produces by the number of employees working there. Thus, it gives us a picture of the relative labor costs for each energy source. A higher value in the graph means a lower labor cost per BTU.

Figure 2 Energy production per employee

And it’s not even close. Each natural gas or nuclear worker provides more energy than their competitors. I wonder where biofuels land. I speculate ethanol is the reason it does it well. In general, renewable employee productivity is less than 10% of non-renewable employee productivity, so their labor cost per BTU is much higher than non-renewable productivity.

This is a big reason why renewable energy costs so much more than our traditional sources. Of course, labor costs are not the only reason.

Clean energy advocates might want us to think they’re building an electric grid. But they are actually running an employment program. Shovel or spoon? Based on the numbers, I would say shovel for some industries, spoon for others.

Julius Sanks is an engineer with experience developing weather satellites and weather forecasting systems, among other things.