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| Photo: thinkprogress.org |
About 66 percent of the electricity in the U.S. is still produced by coal and natural gas; just 7 percent is produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar, The New York Times reports. But market forces and government regulations are rapidly changing the energy landscape.
President Obama's climate change regulations, the Clean Power Plan, have taken direct aim at coal. The Department of the Interior has halted new mines on public lands. In addition, the international Paris agreement on climate change could make efforts to end the burning of coal a global campaign.
These policies are closing the remaining coal-fired plants and freezing the construction of new ones, but they also aim to aggressively increase the production of renewable power. The Clean Power Plan has a goal for 20 percent of the nation’s electricity to come from wind, solar and other clean sources by 2030. Hillary Clinton, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has pledged to raise that amount to 33 percent by 2027, The Times reports.
In Wyoming, for example, about 600 coal miners have been laid off this year alone, and thousands more job cuts are expected this summer, the Times noted. In with a population of fewer than 600,000 people, those cuts are tailing their toll.
Wyoming also offers prime real estate for wind farms, though. The Anschutz Corporation is set to begin construction later this year or early 2017 on a Carbon County wind farm that will stretch some 2,000 acres. When completed, it will be the largest wind power producer in North America, generating enough electricity to power about a million homes, the Times said.
Construction of the wind farm will create about 900 seasonal jobs over the course of the decade it's expected to take to complete and then about 150 full-time jobs to operate and maintain it.
The problem? If job cuts in Wyoming's coal industry continue as predicted, the number of jobs created by wind farms will not match the number lost, and the vast majority of jobs created are seasonal construction. What's more, the limited number of full-time wind jobs don't pay as well in general as those in coal. A wind turbine technician makes an average of about $51,000 per year, compared to $82,000 for coal miners.
from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/28U2dHz Displaced coal workers struggle to find comparable-paying jobs in expanding wind energy industry - Entrepreneur Generations
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