Feds Boost Goal To 75k New Solar Power Workers By 2020 69
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. government has announced plans to help train 75,000 people to enter the solar workforce by 2020, including a number of veterans. The new goal is part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) SunShot Initiative, which helps fund research, manufacturing and market creation. The SunShot Initiative's Solar Instructor Training Network works with 400 community colleges across the country for training, and claims to have already certified 1,000 solar instructors and nearly 30,000 students in the last five years. Ultimately, the SunShot Initiative has a goal for solar energy to reach price parity with conventional power sources in five years.
Re:no future for non-veterans (Score:5, Informative)
But, please feel free to display your ignorance.
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Ignoring the fact that there hasn't been a draft since the end of the Vietnam war, how does entering the armed forces infer lack of racism - my experience in the service was that most demographics were fairly well represented (as one would expect), so the population of racists in the forces was - and probably still is - roughly equivalent to the population in civie land.
Backward Approach (Score:3)
You are right in that their approach is backwards. Instead of focusing on trying to get workers into the industry, they need to offer incentives to actually build and install solar panels that are cost effective. Tax breaks, Grants, etc. (thoroughly vetted though).
The Feds don't train construction workers, they offer tax deductions on home. Then, the workers will follow automatically.
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they need to offer incentives to actually build and install solar panels that are cost effective. Tax breaks, Grants, etc. (thoroughly vetted though).
They've been doing that for a decade.
http://energy.gov/savings/residential-renewable-energy-tax-credit
Re:no future for non-veterans (Score:4, Informative)
Also this isn't a jobs program but a training program. If the economy doesn't create 75k jobs for those trained through this program it won't help them. But if the market is there then they will have the training to work in the field.
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Most who qualify as veteran achieved that status before President Obama was elected. It has nothing to do with serving HIM but rather serving the country. Veterans have a higher unemployment rate than the general public, mostly because most employers don't recognize the skills they bring and that their military training doesn't always translate clearly into civilian HR job listings. Also this isn't a jobs program but a training program. If the economy doesn't create 75k jobs for those trained through this program it won't help them. But if the market is there then they will have the training to work in the field.
Bingo... sort of. It is true that if there is no market, then there are no jobs, but I doubt that the training won't help them. Knowledge is knowledge. I bet quite a few of these people will go on their own establishing their own businesses, or work on the side along side some other activity.
Those who get the training and expect to get a job just like that, they will be seriously disappointing. Which is true for many people getting pursuing most venues of education and training nowadays.
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Solar PV installation seems like a fairly safe bet. The panels and associated equipment are only getting cheaper, and within a few years they will become extremely common and pretty much standard on new builds. If you can invest say $1000 in a system and have it pay back in a year, then another 20-30 years of pure savings or even profit as you feed back in to the grid, why wouldn't you? It's a safe investment.
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The good news is that the economy IS creating that many jobs in solar. 2014 saw 31,000 jobs added in one year, and this initiative is to train 75,000 over 5 years. [thinkprogress.org]
The demand is there, as long as the growth continues, which this poll from 2013 [gallup.com] and this Zogby poll from last week [breakingenergy.com] that shows even 2 out of 3 Republicans agree that the Federal Investment Tax Credit for solar should be renewed.
I have no idea why Slashdot, allegedly a bastion of personal freedom and libertarianism, can't get with expanding persona
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"But it's definitely helping far more than it's hurting."
Not around here ... feed-in-tarriff subsidies grossly penalize normal tax & rate-payers.
Why different policy on this to Junior IT position (Score:5, Insightful)
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Unless your house is also in India, they won't be able to work on it in India.
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Solar Panel installation is grunt work. Three guys to lift the panels and one electrician to make sure they don't electrocute themselves. There is no real need for a Federal program to train people for this.
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Re:Why different policy on this to Junior IT posit (Score:4, Interesting)
What exactly is so special about installing solar panels? It sounds to me like pretty conventional electrical and construction work.
Even recreational marine electrical systems can be more complicated, with a mix of solar, wind, grid, generator, battery (12/24/48V) and mixed loads (native, 12v, AC).
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That's why they are teaching people this instead of CS skills. CS is hard, it needs years of study at a high level just to reach graduate level skill. In comparison installing solar PV systems is easy, can be learnt quickly and at fairly minimal expense, so is ideal for people looking to retrain or move up from burger flipping.
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They could use a similar strategy as the one Ontario's FIT used. As a home owner you pay to install solar panels. The electricity produced is put back into the grid and you receive an amount per KW produced. The return per KW is higher than the current cost of electricity but the government pays for it. This is cheaper since the program promotes the creation of new companies through demand. The requirements for FIT also made it that solar panels had to have a local manufacturing component to them (can't rem
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Why are they implementing all this training network and colleges for the solar industry whereas the solution for IT is "issue more visas"?
Because in this case, there is no worker shortage to begin with.
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Why are they implementing all this training network and colleges for the solar industry whereas the solution for IT is "issue more visas"?
Your cynicism is ridiculous.
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Same reason why plumbers, electricians, HVAC workers, and vend a goat repairmen don't get offshored... it just costs too much to grab people off the boat, train them in US standards [1], then them licensed in the specific state.
Here is what I don't get: What exactly is a "solar job"?
First, there is the actual placing of PV panels. This is just physical moving of the object, dropping it into place and bolting it down, perhaps making sure the single or double-axis controller is calibrated.
Second, and this i
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You missed wiring up the smart inverter. Some places demand them where the solar arrays are not blindly fed into the grid, but intelligently provide the necessary power to the grid, which requires an inverter to either respond to
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The number of H1B visas hasn't changed since 2005. And that's controlled by Congress, not the President.
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Artificial demand, artificial supply, and a bunch of jobless people in the middle. How can this end well.
It works out great if you're a crony [wikipedia.org].
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It would be even cheaper to break your legs. And since you'd be paying for the treatment, it would not cause a drain on the other taxpayers, whilst generating VASTLY greater amounts of profit.
Of course, neither case ends with anything new and productive, but you hate the environmentalist and I hate bigoted fuckwits like you.
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Wrong Solar tech being pushed (Score:2)
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Having lived in a passive solar home for 20 years or so, they are a joy to live in. It's also not something you can add on to an existing home.
Were pushing straight PV when we know that hybrid panels are more efficient on the pv side (hotter panels are less efficient) while adding hot water for heating and domestic hot water.
why this is good (Score:1)
The energy industry should not be a jobs program (Score:5, Insightful)
The success of an energy sector should not be measured by the number of people it employs. The goal of the energy industry should be to produce boatloads of dirt-cheap energy with almost nobody working at it, so we can all go off and do something more fun with that manpower and energy.
It's quite easy to provide tons of energy jobs: we did this 1500 years ago, when almost everyone in Europe worked in the energy sector (farmers and animal handlers and woodcutters, back then). But gradually wind and water mills, coal and steam, electricity and petroleum came along, increasing the energy output of each energy sector worker, providing cheap energy and spare labor that were used a much richer, more interesting society.
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> The goal of the energy industry should be to produce boatloads of dirt-cheap energy with almost nobody working at it, so we can all go off and do something more fun with that manpower and energy.
I disagree. The goal of the US energy policy should be to produce boatloads of clean and safe energy, as cheaply as we can. The goal of the energy industry should be to maximize profits while abiding by the law and minimizing worker injury.
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Point taken. My complaint is that the government is setting employment as a goal for the energy industry, but I didn't distinguish between the two.
But there shouldn't be a distinction: government energy policy should set the rules of the playing field to ensure that energy companies can only maximize profits by producing lots of dirt-cheap, clean and safe energy, so profit motive is aligned with the needs of society.
That IS the end game, isn't it? (Score:2, Funny)
The end game is to artificially create a new domestic market to employ more Americans whose work has left the country as a direct result of outsourcing work to foreign countries. Also known as global socialism or global wealth shifting. The green movement has taken the bait hook, line and sinker, so to speak. I don't blame them; people followed Hitler, Mussolini, Kim Jong Il and Stalin.
That IS the driving force behind climate change initiatives even though the science for climate change is rapidly disapp
Is Elon Musk at Solar City going to hire them all? (Score:2)
Is Elon Musk at Solar City going to hire them all?
I mean, it's great they get training; I'm not so sure training *for this specific vocation* is actually going to be that useful to them.
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Is Elon Musk at Solar City going to hire them all?
Maybe. The Feds have absolutely no idea how many solar workers the market will require - they just pull numbers out of their asses to fool some people into thinking that they should keep their cushy jobs on the taxpayers' dimes (err, debt instruments - total unfunded debt/tax obligations are now $1.4M per worker). Almost all government estimates of future markets are wildly incorrect.
Musk may well even have a better model of workforce requirements than DoE