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The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

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Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#211

Post by eagletusk »

jMyles wrote: post #14
eagletusk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind Farms are built by people living in RVs already, so you've got that figured out. Three months here 6 months there. Embedded software is extremely hard to do mobile, and anyways all of the electronics tech is designed in Germany. Getting a entry level job in wind is about being nearby and willing to work. If you have a college degree you can always be a field Engineer. I'm an Electrical Engineer in the wind indus…

> Getting a entry level job in wind is about being nearby and willing to work. So like, if I see people working at a wind farm, just go up and introduce myself?

Find the construction trailer ask for an application. Make sure you can pass a drug test and actually show up for work then I'd say your chances are 50% , 80 % if you find a job site that is just starting construction.

If you want to know where they are building go through Abilene, TX and ask.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#212

Post by x1798DE »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #111
jnordwick wrote: post #67

This is NOT a good thing. Producing the same amount or less with more resources is generally considered a very very bad thing. It is the definition of being less efficient..

Since you're complaining about downvotes (which I also downvoted), I'll explain why I downvoted: Your complaint doesn't make any sense by itself. You're assuming that they're doing the same or less with more people. I have no idea where you got that idea. Wind is growing rapidly, so the fact that they're employing more people is expected and a good thing. You can't complain about efficiency with only the numerator.

This is true, but it is annoying to tout the number of jobs as if it's a benefit, not a cost. It should be kilowatt-hours / human hour, or some measure of labor productivity if you want to show serviced, or some measure of actual output if you want to show the magnitude of the sector, or both. Giving raw number of "jobs" requires a lot of assumptions about the sector to make it into useful information.

Not to mention, the other comments in this thread do seem to be treating jobs as if they are a benefit, not a cost.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#213

Post by mtempleton »

tuna-piano wrote: post #102

When something is cheap, people buy more of it. If you are someone who wants more wind power to be produced, you want it to be cheap. You should be rooting for cheaper wind prices, which come with increased efficiency (including less employees per unit of energy produced). Of course, less employees per unit of energy could equate to more total employees if the increase in energy produced is greater than the increases…

>If you are someone who wants more wind power to be produced, you want it to be cheap. You should be rooting for cheaper wind prices, which come with increased efficiency (including less employees per unit of energy produced).

This is a pretty good point, and it also leads in to an argument to be made for an important distinction between productivity and jobs.

People like jobs. Politicians and corporations talk about creating jobs. They're seen as universally good, but that is not necessarily the case. Especially as tech becomes more capable of automating more tasks, which may displace labor at a rate in which people have increasing difficulty in retraining quickly enough, it's appropriate to have a cultural shift in perhaps still valuing jobs, but not over valuing human dignity and economic productivity. An example I witnessed: The very grumpy woman in Paris who took a Euro from me to use the toilet could be given the same amount of money generated by an automated toll while she does something productive. Or even she could just do something which she enjoys and would be happier doing, but is non-productive, and that would still be Pareto efficient: it makes one better off without making anyone else worse off.

Policy should not seek to create jobs just for the sake of creating jobs. With appropriate, just and fair economic policies, it really shouldn't matter how many jobs an industry creates: it matters how much utility, and at what utility per dollar the industry is capable of. That is, assuming you care most about human welfare. I think most politicians care most about money and power.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#214

Post by eagletusk »

taway_1212 wrote: post #158
eagletusk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind Farms are built by people living in RVs already, so you've got that figured out. Three months here 6 months there. Embedded software is extremely hard to do mobile, and anyways all of the electronics tech is designed in Germany. Getting a entry level job in wind is about being nearby and willing to work. If you have a college degree you can always be a field Engineer. I'm an Electrical Engineer in the wind indus…

> previously I was in the field, I'm curious about this kind of work, could you share more of your experience? What exactly did you do, how hard was it to find job, was it with one company, how often did you move from farm to farm?

6 months here, 5 there. Long hours. Definitely not boring, great job satisfaction when you can say you helped build a 100 MW Wind Farm. Decent pay.

There are maybe 5 major EPC Engineer Procure Construct companies all of them are very similar.

Lots of military types find the field work similar their previous experience.

You get to meet people from all walks of life, rural farmer to execs of S&P 500 companies.

Lots of driving.

More project management then Engineering if you're​ in the field.

I've also been a part of a few large scale solar farms 20-100MW Same companies and same work situation, but less cranes.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#215

Post by hsjhgktfdy »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #56
noonespecial wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think wind turbines are absolutely beautiful They are. Like living sculptures. There's just something extremely dignified about them. Like finally growing up after the childishness of strip-mining. The adults are here.

I couldn't disagree more. They popped up as I was growing up - littering the coastline and countryside. They can be seen from great distances and serve to make the place seem an awful lot smaller. I for one can't wait until we develop a way to live without them - the only condolence is that they move us away from the coal and gas industries. I do hope that solar leaves them in its wake and we can be done with the mon…

Solar has a much larger physical footprint than wind and there's no getting around that even at 100% efficiency (which will never be obtained). Footprint that unlike wind, cannot be used for agriculture or accessed by much wildlife; it's fenced in and covered with panels.

Here in upstate New York there are planned wind and solar farms in the region and every one of both brings out a certain crowd of torches and pitchforks.

There's no pleasing some people. The energy has to come from somewhere, and right now coal, gas, and nuclear together make up most of the fuel mix.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#216

Post by hsjhgktfdy »

popey456963 wrote: post #179
labster wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd normally agree with you, but the top Uranium producers are Canada, Kazakhstan, and Australia. Uranium mining is a first (and second) world problem.

To be fair, you need _significantly_ less[0] uranium compared with the amount of coal you mine. For every million mountains destroyed by coal mining, you'd only have to destroy a couple of mountains. Not to mention I don't think uranium is usually mined from mountains but rather pit-mined, makes it far better than the alternatives. Personally however, still support solar. Especially solar house tiles, they look good,…

Not every house has solar resource. If your house is in the middle of the woods it's not going to work unless you clear-cut the surrounding woods and then you're not in the middle of the woods anymore. Same if you are in the shadow of a couple of mid-rises. etc. etc. Even if there is solar resource it may not replace more than a fraction of usage. Roof-top solar is great where the resource exists, but it's a partial solution at best. There's still a need for the utility grid and something needs to fuel that. It could be utility-scale solar, but it's not onsite rooftop solar.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#217

Post by eagletusk »

mmanfrin wrote: post #196

I love this -- and many of those 100K jobs are maintainatory jobs, permanent and not tied to continual production and growth. I always hate how projects are touted as 'bringing X many jobs to the region' when a majority of cited jobs are in the construction or building of whatever the project is, and then evaporate away once it's built.

That's the way construction happens. It's a temporary thing.

*Except for the Sagrada Familia building in Spain which started construction in 1982 and is expected to be finished in 2026.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#218

Post by anarazel »

jimmaswell wrote: post #54
Klinky wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the AP-1000 reactor he is citing about to cause the downfall of Westinghouse and Toshiba due to extreme cost overruns? Upfront cost, liability and waste disposable with nuclear cannot be overlooked. He also noted: > A reactor has a 60-year service life. Fukushima suggests otherwise. Holding on to old reactor designs has resulted in catastrophic failures.

From what I've heard, these cost overruns are due to political causes. Waste disposal is a non issue, and Fukashima was due to terrible planning. It wouldn't be solar's fault if someone put too many solar panels on a weak roof and they fell through.

> Waste disposal is a non issue,

Sorry, but that's just a ridiculous position. You can argue that it's a soluble issue, that the long-term hazard and security are manageable and affordable. You need storage that's going to stable over 10s of thousands of years, that will need to be protected for the foreseeable future (unless you want people to have plenty material for dirty bombs etc). That's not cheap, and the is cost that's very likely going to be externalized from the company running atomic plants, since there's obviously no guarantee said company is going to stick around for long enough.

I am perceiving an uptick in lay-people (more or less) advocating for fission power generation over the last 2-3 years. There are some good arguments. But in nearly all cases I end up being unconvinced because all the problems (waste, complexity, massive delays, security) are just waved away with arguments like "waste disposal is a non-issue", "cost overruns are due to political causes", "new reactor designs make the risks infinitesimally small", .... It's obviously a complex problem and just deflecting away the problems that have bogged nuclear power in a lot of quite different countries, isn't convincing unless you're already convinced.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#219

Post by glenstein »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #56
noonespecial wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think wind turbines are absolutely beautiful They are. Like living sculptures. There's just something extremely dignified about them. Like finally growing up after the childishness of strip-mining. The adults are here.

I couldn't disagree more. They popped up as I was growing up - littering the coastline and countryside. They can be seen from great distances and serve to make the place seem an awful lot smaller. I for one can't wait until we develop a way to live without them - the only condolence is that they move us away from the coal and gas industries. I do hope that solar leaves them in its wake and we can be done with the mon…

The disagreement between you and the parent commenter illustrates something that I think is fascinating about NIMBYism with respect to windmills. NIMBYism depends on the idea that the aesthetic judgments of windmills are objective, shared across people. Windmills really do look bad, objectively.

Normally talking about aesthetic experiences as if they are universal is frowned upon, because the judgment of beauty is taken by many people to have an intrinsic quality of subjectivity to it. But that appears not to be a problem in the community of people that oppose wind turbines.

Re: The U.S. wind industry now employs more than 100K people

#220

Post by eagletusk »

CydeWeys wrote: post #142
bfstein wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uninformed speculation: maybe because the places where it's windy are not necessarily the places where it's sunny (and vice versa).

That's definitely part of it, but as solar panel prices continue to fall I suspect that the marginal cost of adding on solar panels to a wind installation will be low enough to justify it even in sub-optimal sunlight conditions. You've already got the land and the power transmission infrastructure taken care of, so it's just the additional cost of the panels. It could start making sense.

Exactly, anywhere plants grow you can put solar, Germany has one of the highest concentrations of solar but pretty dismal sun. Germany stopped building Neuclear Plants and didn't like buying Natural Gas from Russia, so they basically invented the modern Renewable industry.
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