Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
SunPower Corporation, based in San Jose, California, is one of the companies most
involved in the school sector of the Rooftop Revolution. It has installed solar systems
for 90 school districts across the state, using mostly union labor. This is a 25-year-old
company and one of the giants of the US solar industry, with more than 1,000 employ-
ees in offices and manufacturing facilities throughout the country. Many of the people
whom SunPower employs directly have careers common in the solar industry: PhD sci-
entists, lawyers, accountants, engineers, market analysts, manufacturing employees and
installers, sales-people, and customer service representatives.
The company also has 400 independent dealer-partners in 300 cities in 42
states—that's more than 6,000 indirect jobs, by SunPower's calculation. In its supply
chain are 26 US companies that deliver materials like polysilicon and glass as well as
inverters and other system components. SunPower's factory in Milpitas, California, con-
tracts with plants in Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, and Pennsylvania to build its equipment.
Themultipliereffectishardtoquantify,butkeepinmindthatemployeestypicallyreturn
28 percent of their salaries in local, state, and federal taxes, according to the US Depart-
ment of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. And then these workers spend 36 percent of
their salaries on goods and services in the local economy. So the success of SunPower
has effects beyond lower-cost electricity, a reduction in pollution, and the teachers' jobs
that it saves.
If you're wondering whether all this employment generated by solar-power systems
causes the cost of these systems to go up, you can rest easy because that's not the case:
employment cost is factored into the price of the electricity we get from the solar sys-
tems.WehavetheSolarAscenttothankforemployingsomanypeopleinacountrywith
such high unemployment while producing a critical service commodity at a decreasing
price over time.
Keep in mind that the price per kilowatt-hour is going down while the number of em-
ployees is going up. This is because renewable-energy systems are more job-dense than
their fossil-fuel-energy equivalents by a significant factor, depending on the type of fuel
and its application. In the jargon of economists, solar power is “relatively labor-intense”
due to the wide variety and the larger number of jobs required in installation, mainten-
ance, construction, and so on. In an analysis of the literature on the subject, academics at
UC Berkeley determined that renewable-energy technologies create more jobs per aver-
agemegawattofpowergeneratedandperdollarinvestedinconstruction,manufacturing,
and installation than does the processing of coal or natural gas.
Over a 10-year period, the solar industry created 5.65 jobs per million dollars inves-
ted, whereas the entire coal-fired power generation chain produces only 3.96 jobs per
million dollars sunk into it. Put head to head against coal mining, solar produced 40 per-
