Back more than a decade ago(!) when Ken Salazar became the Secretary of the Interior, he forestalled the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) plan he inherited from the previous Administration which had rested on the assumption that the OCS was to be handed over to the oilmen. He wanted to get the public take on this, so he held four public hearings – one on each coast; Washington DC, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Anchorage, AK.
The theme at most of these meeting was that the public was actually much less enthusiastic about oil and gas than about offshore wind, except for New Orleans, where at least 30% of the attendees worked in the fossil fuel industry.
This was back when public hearings were staged so that the public could be heard (as opposed to the “listening sessions” currently staged). So we all got 2 minutes at the microphone to speak to Salazar and his staff. Predictably the industry folks would talk with pride, and no little anger about the years their communities have worked as rough-necks, wildcats, and roustabouts on the rigs in the Gulf, and how offshore wind was going to put them all out of work.
At one point a burly fellow took his place at the mic an introduced himself as the owner of a offshore welding business. His men went offshore to work steel on the oil rigs. And as I was preparing to hear once again how this renewable energy thing was going to kill his business, he changed the tune a bit. He said “these turbines are made of steel, and we’re looking forward to putting them up.”
The jobs component of offshore wind has become so persuasive that even Republicans saturated in oil are having to acknowledge the job opportunities. Big. Domestic. Job Opportunities.
While it has been canny for the offshore wind proponents to lead the argument with “jobs, jobs, jobs,” it would actually be a hard to ignore the point. My “back of the envelope” estimates using US ongoing electrical consumption of 4 terawatts would require about 300,000 of the largest turbines -14MW (not factoring in other renewable energy sources).
300,000 turbines is a lot of steel. And copper, and assembly, and construction. At present China has the lead on turbine manufacturing, as well as steel and copper production. But domestic windfarm construction can’t happen overseas. And there is copper and steel here in the US – along with a lot of idle domestic manufacturing plants that were shuttered in the 1960’s when businesses shipped US manufacturing jobs overseas. Perhaps we could ship some of this work back home?
But there is much more to this pivot on power sources than workers changing out of greasy grey jump suits into clean white ones. We need to look at shifting a high-energy consumption economy from one power source to another in terms of a “balance of harms.” In this series of pieces about offshore wind, the point I am making is that wind power is not without its problems; but against continuing with fossil fuel, it could be great for the economy, and will be much less damaging to our planet.