Dear Editor:
Carmel Mayor James Brainard joined 215 other U.S. mayors in urging America to install solar energy panels as his city was doing. In September, the city announced $3.2 million worth of panels would be installed atop parking garages and at sewage treatment and pumping facilities.
This 1.1 percent of the nation’s more than 19,000 mayors and city managers apparently missed the 2016 Department of Energy report saying it took 96 workers to produce the same amount of electric power two natural gas workers or one coal worker produced. (Wind topped 100,000.)
One hopes the balance of the 19,000 read the papers.
Bill Shaffer
Carmel
The price of solar is about the same now as that of natural gas or coal, and it is cleaner than those fossil fuels. If it creates more jobs than it is a win-win situation. I don’t see a problem here but I do see an opportunity.
Could we see a link to the report?
Seriously, this would be helpful.
I was unable to locate the DoE report Mr. Shaffer cites, but I would venture a guess that he is coming up with these numbers by dividing the number of people in the labor force working in solar, natural gas, and coal, by the amount of electricity generated by those natural resources in 2016.
In my opinion this conveys a false narrative. Solar is growing, new infrastructure is being built. How many new coal fired plants are being built? How many workers does it take to build a coal fired plant? To do an apples to apples comparison you’d need to compare construction costs and operations costs separately.