I mean how is solar energy contributing to the job market?
Is it creating more jobs? If so, which ones?
If not, why not?
2 thoughts on “What are some jobs created by using solar energy?”
beppi
Every growing economic activity usually creates jobs. The solar industry is one of them, as it is growing rapidly. It is also a very international industry with different jobs created in different areas.
There are jobs created in
– research and development of new solar technologies (mainly Germany, Japan, USA)
– making raw materials for solar panel manufacturing (worldwide)
– making industrial machinery for solar panel manufacturing (mainly Europe, Japan)
– producing solar panels (mainly Germany, Asia)
– installing and maintaining solar panels at the end user (mainly Europe)
bestonnet_00
It requires people to manufacture the solar cells (in a semi-conductor plant) as well as people to get up on roofs to install them, PV doesn’t require much maintenance although solar thermal (pretty much restricted to large scale generation) does require quite a bit of maintenance.
The diffuse nature of solar power means that you need a lot of collectors to get a decent amount of power out of it so solar would create quite a lot of jobs for the amount of power generated which is one of the disadvantages of solar power compared to other more concentrated forms of power. Creating jobs isn’t really of much use if the jobs are useless and having more people working in the energy industry than necessary means that there are less people available to work elsewhere (though there are much better arguments against ground based solar power).
If we reduced our energy usage by the levels that many solar and wind proponents want us to then we’d probably find we don’t have enough energy to run any of our factories (although those levels are never going to happen so it isn’t a very realistic worry).
Every growing economic activity usually creates jobs. The solar industry is one of them, as it is growing rapidly. It is also a very international industry with different jobs created in different areas.
There are jobs created in
– research and development of new solar technologies (mainly Germany, Japan, USA)
– making raw materials for solar panel manufacturing (worldwide)
– making industrial machinery for solar panel manufacturing (mainly Europe, Japan)
– producing solar panels (mainly Germany, Asia)
– installing and maintaining solar panels at the end user (mainly Europe)
It requires people to manufacture the solar cells (in a semi-conductor plant) as well as people to get up on roofs to install them, PV doesn’t require much maintenance although solar thermal (pretty much restricted to large scale generation) does require quite a bit of maintenance.
The diffuse nature of solar power means that you need a lot of collectors to get a decent amount of power out of it so solar would create quite a lot of jobs for the amount of power generated which is one of the disadvantages of solar power compared to other more concentrated forms of power. Creating jobs isn’t really of much use if the jobs are useless and having more people working in the energy industry than necessary means that there are less people available to work elsewhere (though there are much better arguments against ground based solar power).
If we reduced our energy usage by the levels that many solar and wind proponents want us to then we’d probably find we don’t have enough energy to run any of our factories (although those levels are never going to happen so it isn’t a very realistic worry).