
Can Wind Power Revive Jobs in America's Heartland? - aaronbrethorst
https://www.citylab.com/work/2017/04/why-is-trump-ignoring-these-good-heartland-jobs/521823/?utm_source=SFTwitter
======
enraged_camel
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
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...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-06/some-blue-collar-
workers-probably-shouldn-t-do-pink-jobs)

~~~
WalterSear
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.

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

~~~
crdoconnor
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.

~~~
artacus
House cats don't kill Golden Eagles.

~~~
crdoconnor
Is there any part of this you find to be inaccurate?

[http://www.awea.org/Issues/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=832](http://www.awea.org/Issues/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=832)

~~~
cathartes
TL;DR. AWEA is a pro-wind lobbying group for wind companies by wind companies,
and the “facts” in this link have many problems. Some of my responses below:

> Turbines almost never kill bald eagles.

Better to attribute the ramping of Bald Eagle populations across North America
to the ban of DDT and other organochlorines, as well as successful restorative
nest hacking in areas where they were extirpated. Windfarms are simply not
common enough to be a mitigating factor (yet).

> Golden eagle fatalities are relatively uncommon at wind projects.

This is a clever turn of phrase. One could also say wind projects are also
relatively uncommon, which is probably the biggest reason there haven’t been
more eagle fatalities. One need to look no further than Altamont Pass,
California, to see what happens when you install a windfarm adjacent to the
largest known population of nesting Golden Eagle in the world. That's a worst
case scenario, of course. But the point is that good siting is pretty much the
key to making bird killing a non-problem. As more windfarms are installed, the
problem will likely become more common.

With that said, state and federal regulators in the USA have either by
omission or intent set very low bars for “voluntary reporting” and mortality
monitoring. The lion’s share of the mortality data that exists is strictly
“proprietary”, and has never been shared. And most windfarms do practically no
monitoring at all apart from the laughingly inadequate pre-construction and
post-construction surveys mandated by the USFWS. And why should they? The
hostile legal environment surrounding permitting, for example, would make it
foolhardy for any company to go out of their way to collect data that could
only become a giant liability down the line. Simply put, the absence of data
for eagle mortality should not be taken as a sign that there is no eagle
mortality occurring.

> The majority of golden eagle deaths occur at older wind farms build in the
> 1980s, when the relationship between turbines and eagles was not understood.
> Better-sited, modern turbines are replacing outdated ones and lowering
> deaths by 80 percent.

They are referring to Altamont Pass, again. Modern turbines are definitely
better. Rather than the picket-line or gauntlet of high-speed blenders
installed atop hills where birds slope-soar and hunt, modern turbines tend to
be spaced much farther apart, greatly reducing the likelihood of a collision.
However, reducing incidence of collision does not mean “lowering deaths”--it
just means that that each “pass” an eagle makes through a windfarm becomes
less dangerous. This distinction is important. In windfarms where choice prey
is abundant, hunting eagles will typically make several extended passes
through a windfarm each day, making their likelihood of an “encounter” with a
turbine quite high over a period of several days or weeks.

They say “lowering deaths by 80 percent”, then backpedal a bit farther down:

> It is estimated that eagle fatalities will be reduced by as much as 80% as
> those long-standing wind sites replace their shorter, more numerous, faster-
> rotating old turbines with taller, less numerous, slower-rotating modern
> turbines that are sited based on more experience.

I was about to say: the only windfarm in the country that’s employed any
serious “repowering” effort is Altamont Pass. And the speculated improvement
that new turbines are better than the old turbines for “lowering deaths” there
has, so far, been inconclusive. It’s not that modern turbines aren’t an
improvement, it’s just that this webpage doesn’t yet have any justification to
be making this claim!

> Modern turbines have slower-rotating blades, and fewer are needed to
> generate the same amount of electricity.

Modern turbines’ rate of rotation is indeed slower, but the speeds of the
actual blades (especially on the distal half) is actually appreciably _faster_
than smaller bird blenders. In practice, it just means the risk is harder to
model, since birds can at times ably pass through the relatively slow rotating
part of the blade path near the nacelle but be likely to be literally sliced
in two if attempting the same manoeuvrer more toward the end of the blade.

> It also seeks scientifically credible ways to lower and mitigate wind
> energy’s impacts.

Translation, wind companies are trying to dig up some legit-sounding research
on the cheap that backs up what they say. With very few exceptions, the
business of wind energy is incompatible with properly funding the research on
its impacts. This slack is left to underfunded academics and conservationists,
not companies built for the purpose of profit.

> Developers thoroughly evaluate risk to eagles before projects are sited and
> built. Developers make adjustment to wind farm design, turbine locations and
> project operations to reduce potential impacts. They abandon the riskiest
> sites in order to avoid significant impacts.

This is basically BS. It wasn’t until the Duke Energy settlement over its WY
wind projects that wind companies starting taking this much more seriously.
Ten years ago, it was more normal to find an environmental consulting group
who’d be willing to game the EIA and pre- and post-contructions surveys to
help you through the federal site permitting process.

> If the risk for eagle collision is high, operators are often required to
> continuously monitor for any impacts on eagles and mitigate for them should
> they occur.

This is BS. Under “voluntary reporting” guidelines, who’s to even know? It’s
only very recently that regulators have imposed any sorts of requirements like
this.

> These permits are similar to take permits available under the Endangered
> Species Act (ESA), which is the gold standard for wildlife protection.

They are not so similar at all, with the sole exception that permit issuance
smacks more of capriciousness by regulators than helping mankind find a
sound(er) balance between wildlife and the needs of man.

I could go on, but why bother? This is just a dumb PR page ...

~~~
crdoconnor
>This is a clever turn of phrase. One could also say wind projects are also
relatively uncommon

One could. I could also say that I drove by about five or six hundred wind
generators today...

Nothing in what you said above really convinces me that you should have
anything against wind farms in general. It's all FUD.

~~~
cathartes
I'm sorry it was not convincing, but I'm not sure why you're saying my
rebuttal is FUD when the PR page is crafted exactly to muddy the very waters
of this topic. You driving by "five or six hundred wind generators" tells me
you went by one larger park, or perhaps a handful of small or medium sized
parks. If you're in the USA, you've also pinpointed a few locations on the map
where you probably live, because there are only a few places presently in the
country with that much installed capacity. Yes, I'm saying that even "five or
six hundred" is miniscule.

But, seriously, I see too many bad faith owners/operators who really don't
give a shit about their effects on wildlife. And I see regulators setting a
low bar and showing no teeth when it actually matters. Altamont Pass is a
prime example--despite knowing about the "bird problem" there for many years,
there has never been a requirement by state or federal regulators for any sort
of mitigation at all. I find that honestly a bit disgusting.

Even the Eagle Take Permit's primary tool of "compensatory mitigation"
(usually in the form of utility pole retrofitting) does not address where the
problem actually occurs. You don't balance wildlife populations like you would
an algebra equation--instead, the side subtracted from is simply subtracted,
even if you conceivably enable gains elsewhere.

------
tabeth
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...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/15/north-
carolina-needed-6500-farm-workers-only-7-americans-stuck-it-out/)

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
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.

~~~
randomdata
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074922)

~~~
chrisbennet
Farm labor tends to be seasonal; making programmer wages for a few weeks and
then being unemployed might not be as attractive as a steady but lower paying
job.

~~~
randomdata
The jobs I'm thinking of are full time, year round, but I understand that may
be an issue in some segments of agriculture.

------
cavisne
"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...](https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/Files/Electricity/NEM/Market_Notices_and_Events/Power_System_Incident_Reports/2017/Integrated-
Final-Report-SA-Black-System-28-September-2016.pdf)

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

~~~
toomuchtodo
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-...](https://cleantechnica.com/2016/12/25/cost-of-solar-power-vs-cost-of-
wind-power-coal-nuclear-natural-gas/)

"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...](https://www.lazard.com/media/438038/levelized-cost-of-
energy-v100.pdf) (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.

------
arca_vorago
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
> 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?

~~~
mistermann
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.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
I think the insanely high housing prices are also largely due to the
centralization of most new jobs centering around urban areas. People go where
the jobs are, which drives up demand for urban housing.

That's how it is in much of the US, at least. I'm not sure if Canada is
different.

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

