Owners of the land on which wind projects are built often receive lease payments ranging from $3,000 to $6,000 per megawatt of installed capacity, as well as payments for power line easements and road rights-of-way. Local governments also benefit from clean energy, most often in the form of property and income taxes and other payments from renewable energy project owners. For example, industries in the renewable energy supply chain will benefit, and unrelated local businesses will benefit from increased household and business incomes. In addition to the jobs directly created in the renewable energy industry, growth in clean energy can create positive economic “ripple” effects.
In contrast, the entire coal industry employed 160,000 people in 2016. The 2009 Union of Concerned Scientists study of a 25-percent-by-2025 renewable energy standard found that such a policy would create more than three times as many jobs (more than 200,000) as producing an equivalent amount of electricity from fossil fuels. Increased support for renewable energy could create even more jobs. The hydroelectric power industry employed approximately 66,000 people in 2017 the geothermal industry employed 5,800 people. In 2016, the solar industry employed more than 260,000 people, including jobs in solar installation, manufacturing, and sales, a 25% increase over 2015. Other renewable energy technologies employ even more workers. More than 500 factories in the United States manufacture parts for wind turbines, and wind power project installations in 2016 alone represented $13.0 billion in investments. In 2016, the wind energy industry directly employed over 100,000 full-time-equivalent employees in a variety of capacities, including manufacturing, project development, construction and turbine installation, operations and maintenance, transportation and logistics, and financial, legal, and consulting services. Renewable energy already supports thousands of jobs in the United States. This means that, on average, more jobs are created for each unit of electricity generated from renewable sources than from fossil fuels.
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Solar panels need humans to install them wind farms need technicians for maintenance. Ĭompared with fossil fuel technologies, which are typically mechanized and capital intensive, the renewable energy industry is more labor intensive. However, NREL's 80-percent-by-2050 renewable energy study, which included biomass and geothermal, found that total water consumption and withdrawal would decrease significantly in a future with high renewables. Hydroelectric power plants can disrupt river ecosystems both upstream and downstream from the dam.
In contrast, fossil fuels can have a significant impact on water resources: both coal mining and natural gas drilling can pollute sources of drinking water, and all thermal power plants, including those powered by coal, gas, and oil, withdraw and consume water for cooling.īiomass and geothermal power plants, like coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, may require water for cooling. In addition, wind and solar energy require essentially no water to operate and thus do not pollute water resources or strain supplies by competing with agriculture, drinking water, or other important water needs. Geothermal and biomass systems emit some air pollutants, though total air emissions are generally much lower than those of coal- and natural gas-fired power plants. Wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems generate electricity with no associated air pollution emissions. Most of these negative health impacts come from air and water pollution that clean energy technologies simply don’t produce. That’s equivalent to 4.36 cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced-about one-third of the average electricity rate for a typical US home. The pollution affects everyone: one Harvard University study estimated the life cycle costs and public health effects of coal to be an estimated $74.6 billion every year. The air and water pollution emitted by coal and natural gas plants is linked with breathing problems, neurological damage, heart attacks, cancer, premature death, and a host of other serious problems.
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