Is this the right jobs program?

This is Bright Ideas, a weekly newsletter about clean energy taking on the world and winning. I’m Julian Spector—I live in L.A. and report on clean energy news for Greentech Media. I write this newsletter for fun. What do you do on Monday nights?

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Everybody gets the value of jobs these days, when they’re not readily available.
And you’ve probably heard that clean energy will summon a new era of mass employment and high-paying wages. That’s a big part of why Joe Biden chose climate action as a pillar of his “build back better” coronavirus recovery plan. 

It’s certainly true that, pre-coronavirus, clean energy jobs were growing while certain fossil fuel jobs persistently declined. But it’s not necessarily true that clean energy is always a boon for jobs, or that all clean energy jobs are the nice, well-paying kind, or that the clean energy jobs that do appear will be accessible to the people who want them.

This week on Bright Ideas, I dig into the complications that ensue when you pitch clean energy as a national employment vehicle. Long-term political viability requires carefully calibrating the promises made on behalf of clean energy, and not promising the wrong things. The rise of clean energy could deliver big savings, or big paychecks, but it’s hard to do both.

Coming for those fossil jobs

The tricky thing about this transition to cleaner energy is that it involves taking away a whole bunch of well-paying jobs that people have right now. And taking away things people have is hard.

Coal mining, coal plant operations? In freefall already. Oil extraction and refining? Much less vital if most cars switch to electric. Running a natural gas plant that barely ever actually runs? We can use batteries instead.

Moreover, the jobs that will recede are not necessarily in places where workers can easily switch to ascendant clean energy occupations even if they want to. The qualities that make an area ideal for digging coal out of the ground generally do not make it similarly attractive for installing acres and acres of solar panels.

Where clean energy jobs spring up, there will be variance. Here in California, the massive desert solar farms effectively have to hire union labor, with all the worker protections and benefits that entails. Silicon Valley clean energy startups do not—see my Tesla post from a few weeks ago.

Even in California...

Even where fossil jobs and clean jobs overlap geographically, the transition can be contentious. This became clear in my sunwashed and breezy home of Los Angeles last year. 

We have our own city utility, the L.A. Department of Water and Power—or “Water & Power” as their vehicles mightily proclaim, and who wouldn’t want both of those things? Since it is part of the city, Mayor Eric Garcetti last year initiated his own version of the Green New Deal, choosing to shut down some beachfront gas plants rather than refurbish them.

Victory for the clean energy cause! But some people weren’t cheering, and those were the members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 18. They saw the gas plants, rightly enough, as a source of pride and family-supporting income. The mayor promised that nobody would get fired as a result of the policy shift, but promises don’t put your kids through college.

The IBEW then spent at least $1 million on political ads attacking Garcetti, and used its clout to temporarily halt approval of the Eland plant, which would go on to break records as the cheapest solar power deal in the country.

The lesson here is not that you shouldn’t shut down gas plants because doing so is fraught with complications. It’s just that doing so is fraught with complications. It should be done with empathy, because nobody likes being told their job is going away through no fault of their own. The fact that it’s for a good cause instead of corporate malfeasance doesn’t really help.

Behold, Water & Power! (Photo credit: stevelyon/Creative Commons)

The price of cheap

I’ve talked at length about the strength of clean energy in raw market competition. A little-discussed ingredient of this success is the relative elimination of labor from the production of power. 

Imagine the work required to mine coal, transport it, combust it, and channel that energy into spinning a turbine that produces electricity. Now imagine several acres of inert silicon panels quietly pumping out electrons when the sun shines. The beauty of solar is how cheap it is to operate; ditto for wind turbines and batteries. They need periodic maintenance, sure, but they deliver power without needing people onsite doing stuff. The most successful renewables developers produce the most power with the least human work.

Saving money is great—just ask a rooftop solar sales rep. But there’s a fundamental tension between wanting cheaper, cleaner energy for customers and using the energy system to direct money to millions of workers and their families.  

If, like Biden, you frame the climate investment as a form of stimulus, then spending federal dollars on clean energy serves the policy imperative of rebooting the economy. Another option is payouts: shut down old coal plants with a retirement package and benefits for the community that depended on the tax revenue from the plant. More expensive, but less societal fallout, hopefully.

You can also reduce the losses from fossil fuel jobs by adapting their skillsets for other purposes. Geothermal involves drilling and pumping fluids into and out of the earth. Some technologies repurpose oil and gas equipment to store clean power as pressurized air in tanks or caverns. These techniques have room to expand.

The Energy Stream AKA what I’m doing in quarantine

I chose my downtown L.A. apartment, in part, because it allowed me to look out on DWP’s headquarters, an underappreciated jewel in the skyline. Not the primary reason we moved there, but it played a role in my appreciation of the place.

Flipping through a photo book of L.A. last night (Both Sides of Sunset, on my coffee table) I was shocked to discover a photo of the building dated 1965. The sharp grid of vertical columns and jutting horizontal platforms has not aged. Architecture manifests power, and this building could teach a master class on projecting confidence. 

In quarantine mornings I jogged there before work. From City Hall, you climb through several blocks of civic mall, until you ascend the apex of Bunker Hill, and behold. The utility headquarters actually looks down on City Hall from higher ground. That may seem out of whack, but think about what Water & Power delivers.

Electricity for lights, air conditioning, WiFi—but people made do just fine before they existed, like that new Star Wars trilogy. 

How about water, in this lovely flowering desert, where you never need to pack an umbrella? Without water, there is no L.A. Water & Power brings us water, and therefore life.

They remind us of this by ringing their mighty fortress with an actual moat, on that hill above City Hall. They took that water from a far away land, but that’s a story for another day.