Green Jobs and the Ethics of Energy - Ethical Engineering for International Development and Environmental Sustainability - page 147

from the UK Horizon nuclear project, it said 'We have come to the conclusion that
investments in renewable energies, decentralised generation and energy effi ciency
are more attractive- both for us and for our British customers' (Teyssen 2012 ).
The rise of renewables should be aided by the rise in cost of conventional energy,
due to diminishing fuel reserves and rising environmental costs, and that will also
provide an incentive to avoid energy waste. That in turn will make it easier for
renewables to meet the reduced energy demand. Energy-saving technologies, and
new patterns of energy use, are a vital part of moving towards a sustainable future.
Although energy saving and renewables complement each other, in this chapter,
I have focussed on the new energy supply options rather than on energy effi ciency
and energy saving, partly for reasons of space: it is a very broad topic, covering a
wide range of potential technical upgrades and reconfi gurations in many sectors of
the economy, as well as possibly the adoption of new patterns of (lowered) con-
sumption. That deserves a chapter on its own, looking at the potential economic and
employment gains. Suffi ce it to say that the potential gains in energy terms are very
large, with, for example, Germany aiming to cut its overall energy demand by 50%
by 2050 and for the UK, a DECC report in 2012 identifying a potential for cutting
electricity demand in some key industrial and building-related sectors by 40% by
2030 (DECC 2012a ).
However, there are longer-term limits to how much energy waste can be reduced.
For example, once the easy, quick and cheap energy-saving options have been
exploited, as they should be, the cost of saving more is likely to rise, and there can
be implementation issues related to behavioural change and consumer take-up
(Elliott 2013 ). The implication is that even with a major energy-saving programme,
if climate change impacts are to be contained, there will still also be a need for new
cleaner sources of energy supply. That said, there is much that can and should be
done in terms of changing how energy is used, as part of the process of moving to a
more effi cient and sustainable energy system.
So having now completed our brief detour around the broad technology change
issues and associated choices, we can go back to our main focus and look in detail
at what the employment implications might be for the new set of green energy sup-
ply technologies.

5 Energy and Employment

On the basis of the simple 'capital versus labour-intensive' distinction outlined
above, it is sometimes argued that relatively simple, often small-scale, technologies
like solar cells and wind turbines are bound to be less capital intense than large, very
complex nuclear power plants, and so their development should lead to more
employment. Superfi cially at least, it certainly seems likely that a lot of people will
be needed to build suffi cient solar and wind devices to equal the output of a nuclear
plant.