Can Wind Power Revive Jobs in America's Heartland?

https://www.citylab.com/work/2017/04/why-is-trump-ignoring-these-good-heartland-jobs/521823/?utm_source=SFTwitter

52 73 9 years ago

I think the top commenter ("cobo") nailed it. The main problem is that a lot of people see their job as their identity. When someone suggests they adapt themselves to another, more modern industry, they see that as an attack on their identity and way of life and dig in. The result is almost always a political mess, as those running for office come up with protectionist, regressive policies to appease those people to be able to get or retain their votes.

massysett• 9 years ago

People tend to be much too glib about this. Megan Mcardle nailed this:

"Moreover, people invest a lot in building up a professional identity, which helps make the work more bearable (and, by giving people pride in what they do, probably ensures that the work is better done). Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-06/some-blue...

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.

As if blue collar workers are not professionals.

WalterSear• 9 years ago

It's more than professional identity: it's social identity too. Conservative society has an answer for everything: how to be a man or woman, who is appropriate to marry, why you shouldn't worry about death or global warming and what is a socially appropriate job, so retraining to do something that comes from outside society is an even bigger identity threat.

enraged_camel2• 9 years ago

>Suddenly abandoning something that has constituted a major part of who you are, and taking a job at the bottom of a new field, is not any easier for a machinist or a coal miner than it would be for a professional.

It's not sudden. At all. The coal industry has been on the decline for quite a while now, and green jobs have been on the rise.

pacaro• 9 years ago

I remember my first exposure to this as a child in the early 80s, a friend of my parents was long term unemployed and I couldn't understand it. My mother's (somewhat unsympathetic tbh) explanation was that he wanted his old job back and that it no longer existed. He did eventually find gainful employment, but in another field.

A little off topic, but a functioning welfare system has the potential to allow people to take the time to find the right job, rather than be pressured into taking the first thing that comes along. It's a question of balance

Clubber• 9 years ago

A little off topic, but a functioning welfare system has the potential to allow people to take the time to find the right job, rather than be pressured into taking the first thing that comes along. It's a question of balance

So does having 6 months of income saved up, but we don't teach any type of finance in high schools.

I understand that some people with jobs don't have that ability, but the vast majority do.

JustSomeNobody• 9 years ago

Interesting. In the tech sector we are always being bombarded with needing to be hooked in socially, have a github presence, etc. So, I guess we are not immune to that either. In order to get a good job, our career cannot be separate from our identity. We have to eat, drink and pee technology.

_m8fo6• 9 years ago

If people weren't so obsessed with their jobs it wouldn't matter where you worked. Unfortunately, we are.

Case and point -- North Carolina and their need for farmers [1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/15/north...

TheAdamAndChe5• 9 years ago

That's a pretty poor example. The laborers were paid $9.70/hr. No American would want to do that when you can make more working at a gas station.

That seems to be the biggest problem with lower class work in the US at the moment. Cost of living is always going up, but the companies want to pay the same paltry wages they were a few decades ago.

_m8fo6• 9 years ago

I don't understand. $9.70 is better than being unemployed. Your comment perfectly illustrates the point I'm trying to make (people care too much about what they're doing and/or where they're doing it -- this naturally leads to your identity being tired to your job). If it's not I'd love to hear the reasoning.

douche2• 9 years ago

Kids used to do a lot of menial farm labor. At least I did... Try getting a 14-17 year old to do anything these days.

randomdata5• 9 years ago

That article is several years old now, and maybe there are some regional factors at play, but as a farmer myself, these days I regularly see offers of $20/hour if you're willing to show up, and closer to $30+/hour if you bring any skills to the table. Despite that, there is still is a lot of struggle to fill those jobs.

And maybe the price just needs to go higher still. I'm not going to tell someone how much they have to work for. But it's interesting that – once you account for the significantly lower cost of living generally found in these rural areas – you're practically making programmer in a big city wages now and that's still not appealing to someone who is unemployed.

In a lot of ways, I think enraged_camel (and cobo) hit the nail on the head[1]. Nobody wants the identity of working on a farm. There are a lot of negative connotations related to that type of work that have been built up over the years.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074922

patrickg_zill• 9 years ago

Part of the problem is, you can go on Craigslist and find non-contract labor in that general area - starting at a wage of at least $10/hour. So $9.70 is simply not competitive at all.

olliej• 9 years ago

No, because they keep wanting to dig coal out of the ground? :-/

arca_vorago3• 9 years ago

No, simply because it doesn't offer enough jobs to make a macro impact, and many of the issues tied to the destruction of the middle class are much larger than just job availability.

You know what could do it though? A new new deal focused not just on national roads and bridges, but public owned internet.

zeroer• 9 years ago

many of the issues tied to the destruction of the middle class are much larger than just job availability.

Isn't job availability the biggest issue when it comes to destruction of the middle class? Could you name a bigger issue?

mistermann2• 9 years ago

In Canada anyways, a combination of 10+ years of zero interest rates, culture, and who knows what else has resulted in a housing bubble such that even if you have a fantastic job, in many cities you're not going to be able to buy a house, ever.

And now, because any policy change (normalizing interest rates for example) that might affect these precious lottery winners is a non-starter. Meanwhile, this bubble is well underway bleeding into the rental market. So it is literally government policy to create a society of have and have nots.

arca_vorago3• 9 years ago

Primarily it is one thing, a lack of economic mobility. Things that factor into that are stagnation of wages, increasing wealth inequality, and the fact that policy has been shown to favor the wealthy. The other commenter also touches on key points, rising rent cost as a % of wage, lack of ownership compared to past generations, lack of interest bearing accounts, etc.

Trick up is real, trickle down is the myth.

toomuchtodo2• 9 years ago

You what could do it though? A new new deal focused not just on national roads and bridges, but public owned internet.

I think this is the profound part, and it contributes toward enraged_camel and massysett's comments as well.

If you want people to take pride in their work, give them ownership: bridges, roads, wind/solar, municipal broadband last mile, contributing towards the maintaining and expansion of national parks and reserves. "I helped build that". It provides purpose. People need purpose in what they do (on top of autonomy and mastery). [1]

This is how you create community from public works projects. "Building Tomorrow Together" would make a great New Deal umbrella project, funded by the US government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive:_The_Surprising_Truth_Ab...

arca_vorago3• 9 years ago

I agree, which is why I have been trying to read up on the constitutional issues surrounding the new deal programs. There is plenty of opportunity to tighten up the MIICC budget and use lots of it benefit real people in the short term and all people in the long term.

I grew up with a national forest as my back yard, so I understand the value of such projects first-hand.

philipkglass• 9 years ago

A coal plant requires a lot of workers to keep running. It requires even more workers to keep it supplied with coal. Per megawatt hour, electricity from coal is more labor-intense than from natural gas, wind, or a utility scale solar PV installation.

A wind farm does not require many full time workers for operation and maintenance. Most present wind industry jobs are in installation and manufacturing. When wind power stops growing and reaches steady-state, employing people for O&M plus manufacturing/installing replacements for aged-out components, the job count is going to plunge.

I don't actually think that wind's low labor intensity is bad. I think it's great that renewables can produce electricity with far less pollution and significantly less human labor than coal plants. But it does mean that switching energy jobs away from coal, even if it were frictionless, still leaves you with fewer jobs than the status quo ante. It's somewhat like trying to switch everyone unemployed by robots into new robot-maintenance-technician careers. The numbers don't work.

bnolsen• 9 years ago

They just need people around to pick up all the dead birds...

crdoconnor4• 9 years ago

Roughly 3 billion birds are killed by housecats each year while 200,000 are killed by wind turbines.

Curiously, when coal/nuclear/gas industry lobbyists (also Trump) emphasize the latter fact they usually fail to point out the former.

bddddbd• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadkill#Distribution_and_abun...

"The number of animals killed in the United States has been estimated at a million per day"

"About 350,000 to 27 million birds are estimated to be killed on European roads each year."

cavisne• 9 years ago

"federal tax credit—which gives producers 2.3 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity for 10 years—is set to expire at the end of 2019" Roughly a 50% tax credit? Once this goes the pretty graph in this article will drop like a rock.

Wind power is not suitable for base load power, not just because of its intermittency but also because the tech running it is designed to exploit government subsidies rather than provide reliable power. A great example of this immaturity here (software defaulted to protecting the wind farm at the expense of an entire state's power supply).

https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market...

Relying on wind power is like using your home router in an ISP datacenter.

MR4D• 9 years ago

You make a good comment (which I generally agree with), and prompted a thought: How much would it take to change this situation?

For instance, the tax credit is a huge subsidy, and obviously reduces the effective capital cost. But once the capital cost is depreciated after a short period of years, then what does the ongoing marginal cost look like?

If it's low, which I expect it is, then can it be retrofitted with batteries or other technology to store energy?

I don't know the answer, but the lower effective capital cost has to have longer term effects - especially when a coal plant is depreciated over a couple decades.

toomuchtodo2• 9 years ago

Without subsidies, utility solar and wind are already cheaper than coal. Rooftop solar is still behind, will catch up in 24-36 months.

https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-...

"The first point is the very basic fact that new wind power and/or solar power plants are typically cheaper than new coal, natural gas, or nuclear power plants — even without any governmental support for solar or wind.

Not only are they typically cheaper — they’re much cheaper in many cases.

Yes, these are levelized cost of energy (LCOE) estimates from Lazard based on various assumptions, and they are averages for the US as a whole rather than prices for specific locations within the US, but the lower estimated costs for these renewables are reflected in the real world as well, where solar & wind accounted for 69% of new capacity additions in 2015, 99% of new capacity additions in Q1 2016, a large portion of new capacity additions in Q2 2016, and probably ~⅔ of new capacity additions for 2016 as a whole."

https://www.lazard.com/media/438038/levelized-cost-of-energy... (warning: pdf)

Even with a reduced capacity factor, if you can shift non-essential loads to when renewables are producing (my pool pump needs to run X hours a day, but I'm happy to wait until the cost of power is low to run it), that's essentially "storage" without needing to pay for storage.

nikdaheratik2• 9 years ago

I don't believe that analysis is accurate. The demand for coal has been going down for years. The power plants themselves are about as good as it is possible for them to be and they still aren't as efficient on a unit-for-unit basis. The only difference is the installation costs which have been going down for wind and solar over the past 10 years and are still not at peak efficiency.

WRT to your comment on base power, that's the main reason why they haven't stopped using those plants completely, but the problem itself is not insurmountable or dependent on coal. In the U.S. and in SA, they are likely going to switch to Natural Gas peaker plants to manage any periods of instability. And that's one of the big reasons why the Feds in Australia are pushing for that new hydro power in VIC.

TL;DR: coal is on the way out, and the base load is a tough, but fixable problem.

cathartes7• 9 years ago

The "intermittency" is an early adoption problem. When you have enough windfarms more uniformly supplying The Grid across the country, this issue will become less of a concern.

What I do see as a big problem is cost. Government subsidies aside, the cost of buying and installing turbines presently is no laughing matter. At scale, solar is rapidly becoming much cheaper to install than wind, which is increasingly becoming reliant on giant 3-5 MW capacity monoliths costing roughly 4-5 million USD a pop--not accounting for installation and maintenance over the long term, and supporting infrastructure and transmission lines to tie the windfarm into The Grid.

Can Wind Power Revive Jobs in America's Heartland?

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