The New York Times Manages To Get This One Entirely Backwards

Some people really don't think things through very well. The New York Times ran with a story that celebrated the fact the solar industry employs far more Americans than wind or coal: 374,000 in solar compared with 100,000 in wind, 160,000 in coal mining and coal-fired power generation, and narrowly behind natural gas, which employs 398,000 workers (in gas production, electricity generation, and petrochemicals).

The article writer was trying to insist that this must be a good thing for solar power, because it demonstrates how important solar power is in creating jobs. Alas, anyone who understands economics would not reason this way - they'd instead reason that solar power presently shows itself to be a pretty unresourceful and inefficient part of the energy industry.

And once you then compare number of workers to energy output as a percentage, things look even worse for solar energy. 398,000 natural gas workers amounts to 33.8% of all electricity generated in the United States and 160,000 coal employees amounts to 30.4%, whereas 374,000 solar workers amounts to just 0.9% of total electricity.

If you try to break that down to electricity generated per worker, then coal generates 7,745 megawatt hours of electricity per worker, natural gas is 3,812, and solar is a measly 98 megawatt hours of electricity per worker. That is to say, producing the same amount of electricity requires 1 coal worker, 2 natural gas workers and a whopping 79 solar workers.

To put that into perspective, it would be like having three large supermarket chains across the country, producing the same output, but Supermarket A does so with 300,000 workers, Supermarket B does so with 600,000 workers, and Supermarket C doing so with 23.7 million workers, and the state subsidising Supermarket C because it thinks it provides better value than A and B.

Solar energy is, at present*, showing itself to be a wasteful and inefficient method of producing energy, but people won't get why until they understand that jobs are a cost of doing something, because they are the price we pay for people's labour.

I encourage any readers who deny that jobs are a cost to email me immediately, as I have plenty of opportunities for you to partake in some 'cost-free' activities. You can come and wash my car, do the dusting and hoovering, and while we're at it, my bathroom could do with a good clean too. And, of course, you won't want paying for any of that because according to you those activities do not have any costs attached to them.  

* I say at present, because there probably will be a time when solar power is the predominant and most efficient energy technology