I still remember when my Mom or Grandma would drive us out from Los Angeles to Palm Springs. It was a long ride for an impatient kid such as myself, but I loved to see the windmills as we got close to our destination. Watching the giant turbines spin around and around added a degree of activity to the deserts and the mountains along the Interstate. They were all by themselves out there, but I had no idea how many people it took to build or maintain them. Now in 2009, the workforce dedicated to the industry is better than ever.
From The Green Wombat:
Wind industry jobs jumped to 85,000 in 2008, a 70% increase from the previous year, according to a report released Tuesday from the American Wind Energy Association. In contrast, the coal industry employs about 81,000 workers. (Those figures are from a 2007 U.S. Department of Energy report but coal employment has remained steady in recent years though it’s down by nearly 50% since 1986.) Wind industry employment includes 13,000 manufacturing jobs concentrated in regions of the country hard hit by the deindustrialization of the past two decades.
The big spike in wind jobs was a result of a record-setting 50% increase in installed wind capacity, with 8,358 megawatts coming online in 2008 (enough to power some 2 million homes). That’s a third of the nation’s total 25,170 megawatts of wind power generation. Wind farms generating more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity were completed in the last three months of 2008 alone.
Another sign that wind power is no longer a niche green energy play: Wind accounted for 42% of all new electricity generation installed last year in the U.S. Power, literally, is shifting from the east to west, to the wind belt of the Midwest, west Texas and the West Coast. Texas continues to lead the country, with 7,116 megawatts of wind capacity but Iowa in 2008 overtook California for the No. 2 spot, with 2,790 megawatts of wind generation. Other new wind powers include Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado and Washington state.
Although wind power only accounts for a small percentage of our total energy usage, the increasing numbers (both in jobs and percentage of new energy) portends a promising future. There are so many prime areas still out there to be utilized by the growing industry and as a result, more green jobs. We still have a long way to go, but the bigger wind power gets, the harder it will be to stop it's emergence and eventual dominance (in conjunction with solar and geothermal power) over fossil fuels.
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