Robots Challenge Green Jobs
It’s nothing we haven’t seen before: manufacturers cutting manpower and increasing output through automation. Automation seized the auto industry, steel industry, chemicals industry, and even the retail industry (self-service check out lanes). Now the prospect (and likelihood) of increased automation is challenging the green job sector as well.
Because the industry is so young, the cost in jobs may be tough to calculate – or easy to ignore. As former Pennsylvania Congressman Elmer Holland said way back in 1961, “One of the greatest problems with automation is not the worker who is fired, but the worker who is not hired.”
Photo Credit: greenforall
At this year’s Intersolar Conference in San Francisco, SunPower president Dick Swanson broke down how many jobs each step of the solar chain requires. To produce 1 gigawatt (GW) of solar power each year, it would take:
- 250-500 jobs to produce the polysilicon
- 250-500 jobs to make the ingots
- 3,000-6,000 to build the solar cells
- 1,500-3,000 for panel lamination
- 2,500-5,000 to integrate the solar systems
That results in as many as 16,000 jobs per GW of solar power. But Swanson adds that with increased automation, those numbers are likely to fall by as much as 75 percent.
The sad fact of the matter for America’s hungry workers is that robots are efficient and more importantly, a hell of a lot cheaper than human hands. Any argument otherwise will be hard to put forward in the near future as the solar industry races toward grid parity with fossil fuels. Not to mention that manufacturing is a primary driver behind high solar costs.
Sure, the solar industry creates high-quality green collar jobs and demand remains high for skilled workers in green trades, but robots may end up taking a majority of those jobs away before they even exist. The question is whether or not that’s OK. Do we sacrifice green jobs for low-cost solar?
The hard truth is that as potential workers, there won’t be much of a choice. The corporate model is always to downsize – to cut labor and manufacturing costs and increase profits. This is the nature of capitalism, although one x-factor will be the ultimate power of unions within the solar industry.
Regardless, many jobs are being created by solar power proliferation and the industry is not the only source of green jobs. Solar installation, passive solar design, green building, recycling, local organic farming, environmental cleanup – these are just a few green sectors that are difficult to automate. Humans have a much broader range of talents than robots do. We just need to find healthy and beneficial ways to use them.
Posted on August 21st in Solar Politics by Dan.