The Convenient Truth about Green Jobs

I have reviewed all of your citations and read the underlying “papers” relevant to the topic of Spanish renewables program.

Using your list of citations:
Altman on Switchboard cites Media Matters but does not list any data-based disqualifiers for the Spanish study, and then mis-represents what the Wall Street Journal published about the study. He does attack the Spanish authors for being linked to an oil company and the Heartland Institute.

Morsella on Green Economy, also linked to the above, references a paper written at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, but also does not list any data-based or methodological errors in the Spanish study, other than cherry-picked references from the NREL paper. By the way, she is an H.R. Recruitment professional and blog editor, which may account for the lack of specificity in her attacks.

The citations listed above refer to an LLC, the National Renewable Energy Lab, which performs contract work for the D.O.E. In the paper, written by Suzanne Tegen and Eric Lantz, the authors criticize the Spanish study for its methodology, but do not offer data-based refutation or error identification. Rather they cite a study by Ulrike Lehr as the preferred methodology. In the summary portion of their paper, they offer no alternative conclusions to the Spanish study. Indeed one of the key passages does not really challenge the underlying question of the Spanish study, which is:

“In summary, the analysis performed in this recent study is not a jobs impact estimate and, therefore, provides little insight into job creation or job loss from Spanish RE policy. Additionally, this analysis has oversimplifications and assumptions that lead to questions regarding its quantitative results. Finally, the authors fail to justify their implication that because of the jobs comparison, subsidies for renewables are not worthwhile. This ignores an array of benefits besides employment creation that flow from government investment in renewable energy technologies. Nevertheless, the authors’ basic question regarding whether investment in RE provides a positive or negative employment impact is a fair one.”

The NREL study cites a paper by Ulrike Lehr and Christian Lutz as containing the preferred methodology. The paper, “Green Jobs? Economic Impacts of Renewable Energy in Germany?” contains no detail about its methodology. In fact, it does not offer data that supports its conclusions, which pertain exclusively to Germany. The key conclusion about the “preferred” methodology, offered by the authors themselves, is that there are winners & losers to the employment questions depending on the assumptions in the model. Devastating … and irrelevant to the Spanish study.

In terms of the Spanish study, it relies on data and estimates from a MITRE report from 2003. The organization, Monitoring and Modelling Initiative on Targets Renewable, appears to be a think tank and makes recommendations about Europe’s renewables push for policy makers at the E.U. level. This paper, again, contains no insight into the methodology for its models. It provides job creation estimates based on a baseline, and with a renewables push. Its fundamental conclusion appears to be that ~50,000 net jobs will be created in renewables. It also presents the generation capacity which will be installed, and the energy consumption. Oddly, in NO case, will installed capacity satisfy projected demand. I interpreted that to mean that MITRE was pushing decision makers to expand the renewable program. Nothing like doubling-down on a policy that won’t achieve its stated goal.

As for the Spanish study, it does have a number of problems. For one, it uses the job numbers from the MITRE report, which itself is obscure. The net job creation in that report is optimistic. So, the Spanish authors use the renewable advocates’ own numbers to attack the viability of the renewable energy program. The job creation estimates are over-optimistic and that renders ammunition on the financial side when the actual subsidy amounts are calculated in the Spanish study.

The main numerical argument in the Spanish study is financial, NOT employment based. It cites some anecdotal job loss scenarios from manufacturing and metallurgy companies, but offers no actual job numbers to support. The employment extrapolation is tenuous.

It cites, accurately, the investments in renewables and the resulting electrical generation expansion. It calculates the financial cost versus the economic outcome. The authors overextend the financial analysis by calculating worker productivity, and the resulting “loss” of private capital to the economy. The assumption that capital would be used more productively than the government investment is not proven, but it is not unrealistic.

The strengths of the Spanish study are: it provides the numbers it is using in its calculation, and the calculations are correct. It details the direct cost of the subsidy investments in renewables and the direct cost per job. Its underlying approach, financial analysis, is not the best method to prove its hypothesis, but it is a valid approach and openly disclosed.

The weaknesses of the Spanish study are: its use of job numbers by another study (MITRE) in which the source of the underlying data is not disclosed; it extrapolates employment numbers from financial data, and it extrapolates Spanish results onto the U.S., which is entirely different in its energy base due to large internal supplies. There is a general consensus in the literature that cheaper carbon energy compromises the economic viability of renewables, and therefore the employment outlook for renewables.

So, the Spanish study, though not rigorous and somewhat slanted in its approach, is NOT disproved. Often in the “debunkers” arguments, they assert that the Spanish study does not account for indirect economic expansion, such as export of technology, equipment, or energy. But those complaints are never accompanied by data that actually show that such benefits actually exist. There is often an overstatement of the job creation by renewables during the Euro boom years (1997-2007), and then a dismissal of job losses as related to the financial bust after 2007.

The problem with ALL of the papers is the lack of verifiable employment data, and the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes a job in the renewable sector. There is also little transparency to the methodology, logarithms, or supporting data to ANY of the arguments.

And just a note to the Director: citing someone who cites a paper which cites a study which does not contain any methodology about the subject at hand (Spain) does not disprove a study which openly displays its numbers. But propaganda is never about the truth. Is it?