Tech Island: U.S. renewable energy jobs can completely replace coal jobs
Ann Arbor – Across the U.S., local wind and solar jobs could completely replace jobs in coal-fired power plants, occupations that will emerge in the coming decades as the nation’s power generation system moves away from fossil fuels, according to a new University of Michigan study. disappear.
As of 2019, coal-fired power generation directly employed nearly 80.000 workers at more than 250 plants in 43 US states. The new UM study is the first to quantify the technical feasibility and cost of replacing these coal jobs with local wind and solar jobs nationwide. The study, published online Aug. 10 in the peer-reviewed journal iScience, concludes that local of wind and solar jobs can fill the generation and employment gap, even if all new jobs are required to be located within 50 miles of each decommissioned coal plant.
Nationally, maintaining local employment would add $83 billion, or 24 percent, to the cost of replacing workers in U.S. coal-fired power plants, the study showed.
“These costs are enormous individually, but relative to the $70 billion in annual U.S. electricity investment and the total cost of transitioning the U.S. energy system from fossil fuels (estimated to be as high as $900 billion by 2030) very small," said study senior author Michael Craig of UM's School of Environment and Sustainability.
"Our findings suggest that replacing lost jobs in coal-fired communities would modestly increase the overall energy transition cost while significantly contributing to a just transition for a class of front-line communities," said Craig, assistant professor of energy systems and power system emissions expert. Operations and planning.
Federal policymakers could introduce new investment tax credits to help cover the cost of replacing coal with local renewables, UM researchers said. The credit applies only to wind and solar projects that are located near coal-fired power plants that are about to retire and employ trained coal-fired power plant workers.
Previous studies have concluded that aggressive mitigation of climate change will require deep and sustained reductions in heat-trapping carbon dioxide gas emissions.
Since electricity is the least expensive sector to decarbonize, much of the early reductions in U.S. emissions came from this sector, largely due to the shift from coal to natural gas in the power generation mix.
Many decarbonization pathways will phase out most or all U.S. coal-fired power plants over the next 10 to 20 years. Power generation from these decommissioned plants needs to be replaced by new low-carbon energy sources. Despite the rapid growth of U.S. wind and solar power generation, previous research has not quantified the feasibility and cost of replacing coal jobs with local wind and solar jobs nationwide.
New UM research helps fill these research gaps. It applies a bottom-up optimization model to all coal-fired power plants adjacent to the U.S. and assumes that the U.S. will completely phase out its coal-fired fleet by 2030.
As each coal-fired power plant is decommissioned, the model requires new renewable energy investments to replace generation and employment at decommissioned plants. The model replaces electricity generation and employment from coal-fired power plants with wind and solar energy located within a specified distance of decommissioned power plants.
The researchers analyzed three "site constraints," the maximum distances for replacing solar and wind facilities relative to decommissioning coal plants: 50 miles, 500 miles and 1.000 miles. The 50-mile limit approximates local solar and wind facilities and jobs that do not require relocation of coal-fired power plant workers, while the 1.000-mile limit includes jobs that require relocation.
The researchers found that annual renewable energy employment completely replaced coal employment across most regions and sites in the United States. Retired coal-fired power plants are being replaced by a mix of wind and solar power in all regions and under all siting constraints.
Research shows that operations and maintenance jobs account for 57% to 92% of replacement jobs at wind and solar facilities, with construction jobs playing a smaller role. Operation and maintenance work includes on-site technical staff and administrative staff.
In the short term, coal-fired power generation is likely to continue to be displaced by new renewable energy investments and increased reliance on existing natural gas-fired power plants. The current study did not consider the extent to which the use of existing assets would reduce renewable energy jobs. Additionally, the current study did not assess the impact of workforce retraining requirements on coal-fired power plant workers.
The lead author of the iScience study is Max Vanatta of the UM School of Environment and Sustainability. Additional authors are Bhavesh Rathod of SEAS, Julian Florez of UM's Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, Isaac Bromley-Dulfano of UM's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Dylan Smith of UM's Applied Physics Program.
Funding for the research was provided by Idaho National Laboratory's Emerging Energy Markets Analysis Program and the UM School of Environment and Sustainability.