Losing Jobs With
Green Technology
BY: DENNIS T. AVERY
CHURCHVILLE, VA—President Obama has allocated $4 billion in “stimulus
funds” to help advance the “smart grid,” which is intended to seamlessly
integrate all our new solar and wind power into the national supply of electricity. Much
of the $4 billion will be spent to install 20 million new digital “smart
meters.” These meters will instantly tell the power company how to deploy its varied
generating sources most effectively.
The “stimulus fund” goal is to create new “green” jobs. The Washington
Post estimates that deploying the 20 million smart meters will create jobs for about 1,600
installers, and keep them employed for about five years. The manufacturing process for the
meters will be highly automated, so only a few hundred jobs would be involved there.
Still, 2,000 green jobs for five years, paid for by stimulus funds, must be good. Or is
it?
Let’s think this through. The smart meters report automatically to the power company.
We’ll lose 28,000 existing, permanent jobs for meter-readers. The Washington Post
says all our “green” energy efforts are likely to produce only tens of thousands
of jobs, not the millions of jobs needed to keep America at full employment.
A good Spanish study, led by Dr. Gabriel Calzada of Juan Carlos University in Madrid,
found that every renewable-energy job created by the Spanish government has destroyed 2.2
other energy-related jobs. Worse, every megawatt of expensive “green energy” has
destroyed 5.39 jobs in non-energy sectors as products became too expensive for consumers
to buy—or as manufacturing shifted to countries without energy taxes. President Obama
has held Spain up as a country for us to emulate, which only emphasizes that
Calzada’s study is likely an Obama-valid blueprint for our own energy future.
Note, by the way, that China has already become the world’s major source of wind
turbines, cutting further into Obama’s “green job” expectations. The wind
turbine manufacturing will shortly be joined by our steel and aluminum industries,
fertilizer plants and many other production facilities when the U.S. energy penalty taxes
mount up.
Unfortunately, the $4 billion doesn’t replace our massive existing investments in
coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, in gasoline refineries and service stations, in
natural gas pipelines and drilling rigs. In reality, the renewables will subtract from our
standard of living.
In 2007, U.S. subsidies to coal-fired electricity were 44 cents per megawatt hour,
compared with $23.37 in subsidies for wind turbine megawatts, and $24.34 in subsidies per
solar megawatt. That’s a fair measure of the added cost for renewables, except that
wind and solar megawatts must also be billed for the additional costs of the fossil fueled
plants that must be built and kept in “spinning reserve” in case the wind drops
or clouds cover the sun. Denmark, a world leader in wind, has not decommissioned any
fossil-power generators because of its “spinning reserve” requirement.
As Obama’s energy taxes force reductions in coal and oil production, the price of
U.S. energy will double and triple—and so will the costs of the things we buy.
Clearly, if the President wasn’t afraid of man-made global warming, we would not have
spent the $4 billion on the “smart grid” at this moment of recession. Nor would
we be planning massive and ineffective wind farms.
We might, instead, be designing new coal-fired power plants with the Department of
Energy’s latest discoveries in clean-burn technology.
DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an
environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He
is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years,
Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net
Source: Gabriel Calzada; “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to
Renewable Energy Sources,” Juan Carlos University, Madrid; March, 2009.
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