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| Wed, 29th Jul 2020 15:16:00 |
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To recharge America’s job market, build a green electric grid |
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Sadly, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we now have the highest unemployment we’ve seen since the Great Depression. Many of those jobs will disappear forever in the post-COVID world, and others will take years to return to normal. But with great crises come great opportunities. Today we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to solve our current economic crisis: by switching to clean energy.
At Rewiring America, we estimate we can create some 25 million U.S. jobs if we move on from fossil fuels and electrify the economy by 2035, as we’ve detailed in a recent study . This estimate comes from an in-depth energy and engineering analysis from comprehensive datasets of energy, labor, and materials, conducted by the two of us and MIT engineer Sam Calisch. We know, with great precision, where our energy currently comes from, how much we use, what we will need to build to transform our system to one with zero carbon emissions–and how many people it will take to build those things.
Simply put, clean energy technologies require more labor in manufacturing, installation and maintenance than fossil fuel technologies. It takes more people to install and keep a wind farm running than it does to drill a well and keep it pumping to produce the same amount of energy over time. All those jobs have a multiplying effect: The woman installing wind farms will get a handsome paycheck that she'll spread around her local economy, reviving restaurants, shops, and other hard-hit businesses.
To power our lives without fossil fuels to the level of comfort we enjoy today (cars, heated homes, and other push-button conveniences), we’ll need to build capacity to generate approximately 1500 GW of electricity, which is more than three times the amount of energy that the U.S. currently generates. The scale of electrification will be more massive than any project America has seen in decades. We will need hundreds of thousands of wind turbines, six million zero-emission trucks, a million miles of transmission lines, hundreds of millions of electric vehicles, heat pumps and electric induction ranges, billions of solar cells and more than a trillion batteries. And we’ll need tens of millions of jobs to manufacture, build, install, and manage all those things. Read original full article
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