Solar Farm #2, dangers involved.

[Hay Dude]

Since there's about zero solar panel production in the US compared to China already, no US energy jobs will be replaced by Chinese energy jobs, so that argument is moot.

Why is it moot? Or why would anyone look at it that way? If we made them here, at least Americans jobs would be created. Also, since solar is replacing fossil fuels, more American jobs are surrendered. Hardly a “moot point”. It’s a HUGE point. Lost American energy jobs. Jobs once working mining coal, fracking NG, railroads, building & maintaining power plant infrastructure now lost to CCP chinese built solar panels.

Sign me up. Sounds GREAT for America!

There are battery plants up, going up, or planned to go up in the US. Those are US jobs in the plus category.

Many are Chinese owned battery plants. A huge Chinese-owned one is planned for Michigan. Might create a few jobs. My guess is the work will be handled through robotics. The battery parts & precious metals are mined in Africa using child labor.
Grotesque.
Who wants that crap in our country? Do people only get offended by Christians, or American traditions? But no one cares their “planet saving” energy infrastructure is built by the CCP & China, a country hostile to the USA?

Solar jobs in the US have outnumbered all oil, gas and coal jobs combined since at least 2017. Those are not Chinese jobs. They're American jobs.

Coal is toast as an energy source. It's dirty and expensive to maintain. Places that relied on employment heavily in coal are going to have to adapt. That means either their civic leaders are going to have to go after other business to bring into the area (something they should have already been doing for decades) or the people are going to have to leave to seek other employment. They have to retool. That's all there is to it.

Senator Moss speaks. Coal is over because it makes smoke. It could be cleaned, but as of now it’s not economically feasible. It might come back. Nobody really knows. Not you and not I.

And as with just about every other form of employment, automation reduces the number of workers no matter the industry or country.

Do any of us lament the loss of gas station attendant jobs? Elevator operators? Telephone operators? Lamp lighters? Pin setters? Linotype operators? Ice cutters? Etc... All those and plenty more have been replaced by automation and shifts in technology.

It sucks to be on the tail end of a dying technology that you may have planned your entire future around. I know this from personal experience. However, you have to adapt or suffer the consequences.

As for the land itself, solar is easier on the land than conventional agriculture. I spent spent Sunday afternoon at a baseball game with a farmer friend of ours. We talked quite a bit about this and crops. They farm about 10,000 acres. Corn and soybeans, plus 6000 hogs several times a year.

He said soybeans take 6 passes a year with machinery. Planting, herbicides, pesticides, harvest, etc.

When land goes to solar panels, there's less water usage, less chemical applications, less fertilizer applications, less water and wind erosion, less runoff into streams and waterways, more sources of food and shelter for wild animals VS a corn or bean field, pollinators benefit, so crops in and next door to solar farms benefit.

Crops can be grown in solar farms. There's abundant greenways to control erosion and runoff. There are quite a few interesting article on agrivoltaics. Here's an interesting video. Plenty more out there.

Nobody is debating that an inanimate object like a solar panel is less intrusive than pig or row crop farming, but these freaks that want to eliminate farming out of existence and/or act like solar has no environmental impact are really uniformed.
Farming has to continue and continue without farmers being harassed out of existence. We can’t survive without abundant healthy food grown domestically.

Talk to the farmers that are leasing out their land for solar and see how they feel about it. I've spent 20+ years here on TBN listening to folks talk about farmers being the best stewards of the land, so don't interfere with agriculture. What's changed?

I guess it just depends on who's ox is being gored.

I’ll tell you who’s ox is being gored-the American domestic fossil fuel industry and the American taxpayer for paying higher energy costs.

 

[MossRoad]

Why is it moot? Or why would anyone look at it that way? If we made them here, at least Americans jobs would be created. Also, since solar is replacing fossil fuels, more American jobs are surrendered. Hardly a “moot point”. It’s a HUGE point. Lost American energy jobs. Jobs once working mining coal, fracking NG, railroads, building & maintaining power plant infrastructure now lost to CCP chinese built solar panels.
....

Jobs making solar panels never existed in great number in the US. So you cannot count them as lost jobs. That's fairly easy to understand.

Solar is replacing some fossil fuels in the US, and generating more jobs than it is taking from fossil fuels in the US. That's also fairly easy to understand.

There's been a net gain of jobs in the entire energy industry, and solar is driving it.

From here:

U.S. Energy & Employment Jobs Report (USEER)

The landing page for U.S. Energy & Employment Jobs Report (USEER).

www.energy.gov

As the private sector continues to announce major investments in American-made energy thanks in large part to the Investing in America agenda, the 2023 USEER shows that the energy workforce added almost 300,000 jobs from 2021 to 2022 (+3.8% growth), outpacing the growth rate of the overall U.S. workforce, which grew by 3.1%. Clean energy jobs increased in every state and grew 3.9% nationally. With the
goal of an electrical grid run on 100% carbon-free sources by 2035 and a net zero economy by 2050, energy jobs are expected to see continued growth in every pocket of the America.

The 2023 USEER also found that employers are seeing the benefits of strong unions. Employers with unionized workforces reported substantially less difficulty with hiring skilled workers than non-unionized employers.

 

[MossRoad]

...
Farming has to continue and continue without farmers being harassed out of existence....

Couldn't agree more. The farmers are leasing the land for these large solar installations. Stop harassing them.

 

[two_bit_score]

Who wants that crap in our country? Do people only get offended by Christians, or American traditions?

It seems to be Moss who is most often offended by Christians and American tradition. Either that or he is trying to stir the pot and shut down the thread, again.

 

[two_bit_score]

Couldn't agree more. The farmers are leasing the land for these large solar installations. Stop harassing them.

Here he goes again.

 

[Hay Dude]

Jobs making solar panels never existed in great number in the US. So you cannot count them as lost jobs. That's fairly easy to understand.

Solar is replacing some fossil fuels in the US, and generating more jobs than it is taking from fossil fuels in the US. That's also fairly easy to understand.

There's been a net gain of jobs in the entire energy industry, and solar is driving it.

From here:

U.S. Energy & Employment Jobs Report (USEER)

The landing page for U.S. Energy & Employment Jobs Report (USEER).

www.energy.gov

As the private sector continues to announce major investments in American-made energy thanks in large part to the Investing in America agenda, the 2023 USEER shows that the energy workforce added almost 300,000 jobs from 2021 to 2022 (+3.8% growth), outpacing the growth rate of the overall U.S. workforce, which grew by 3.1%. Clean energy jobs increased in every state and grew 3.9% nationally. With the
goal of an electrical grid run on 100% carbon-free sources by 2035 and a net zero economy by 2050, energy jobs are expected to see continued growth in every pocket of the America.

The 2023 USEER also found that employers are seeing the benefits of strong unions. Employers with unionized workforces reported substantially less difficulty with hiring skilled workers than non-unionized employers.

I bet a lot of those jobs are added because of covid lockdowns.
The government likes to lie and play with the jobs numbers this way, too.
Here’s how it works: People lost jobs during covid shut downs. When they were re-hired in 21 & 22, they were counted as new jobs. They are just people re-entering the workforce back to jobs they already had after the covid lockdowns that destroyed the economy in 2020.

I don’t belive those statistics. And I don’t believe unboxing and setting up chinese solar panels and batteries made with African slave laborers and child labor will EVER benefit this country.

I have ZERO problem with clean energy. I’m all for it.
I have a BIG problem with with solar & wind equipment being made by hostile actors or slave/child labor in foreign countries.

Never say we can’t make/build something here. It should all be made here, instead of by shady deals with bad people who aim to destroy us.

Stupid and reckless.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

Where I came from, in 60s-80s coal mining was the biggest employer. Next was the aluminum plants, one converted ore into blocks, one made products from it. All powered by coal.
The war on coal shut it all down.
Hundreds if not thousands of jobs gone. Most of the Coal mines now closed, 2 there are no buildings left. Only the old timers knew there were mines there. Power plants shut down, again one totally torn down and removed. places I interviewed at coming out of college in the 80s, now removed from the face of the earth. The aluminum plants gone. One torn down. There is still plenty of coal in the ground.

The whole area went from prospering to poverty. My home town has been declining since then.

The saving Grace was the discovery of oil and gas in the early 2000s. Lots of drilling, pipelines created jobs.
Now the war on fossil fuels is slowing that down, but they are still drilling in spite of the efforts.
Our country is destroying itself and it starts at the top by those that are stuffing their pockets by selling US out.

 

[RidgeTopWVA]

Where I came from, in 60s-80s coal mining was the biggest employer. Next was the aluminum plants, one converted ore into blocks, one made products from it. All powered by coal.
The war on coal shut it all down.
Hundreds if not thousands of jobs gone. Most of the Coal mines now closed, 2 there are no buildings left. Only the old timers knew there were mines there. Power plants shut down, again one totally torn down and removed. places I interviewed at coming out of college in the 80s, now removed from the face of the earth. The aluminum plants gone. One torn down. There is still plenty of coal in the ground.

The whole area went from prospering to poverty. My home town has been declining since then.

The saving Grace was the discovery of oil and gas in the early 2000s. Lots of drilling, pipelines created jobs.
Now the war on fossil fuels is slowing that down, but they are still drilling in spite of the efforts.
Our country is destroying itself and it starts at the top by those that are stuffing their pockets by selling US out.

Hopefully people will wake up and things will start getting better January 2025 .

 

[MossRoad]

It seems to be Moss who is most often offended by Christians and American tradition. Either that or he is trying to stir the pot and shut down the thread, again.

Nice to see you spreading more inaccurate information about me. I was going to be a priest, but had a stronger calling to be a husband and father. My wife is a devout Catholic. I've been with her for 44 years. I volunteer at her church doing groundskeeping, light construction, computer networking, etc. Every time they need help, I jump in. Why? Because I support her beliefs.

Every time you pick some subject to bash me on, you're horribly mistaken.

Again, your personal comments about me so often are pretty creepy.

 

[MossRoad]

I bet a lot of those jobs are added because of covid lockdowns.
The government likes to lie and play with the jobs numbers this way, too.
Here’s how it works: People lost jobs during covid shut downs. When they were re-hired in 21 & 22, they were counted as new jobs. They are just people re-entering the workforce back to jobs they already had after the covid lockdowns that destroyed the economy in 2020.

I don’t belive those statistics. And I don’t believe unboxing and setting up chinese solar panels and batteries made with African slave laborers and child labor will EVER benefit this country.

I have ZERO problem with clean energy. I’m all for it.
I have a BIG problem with with solar & wind equipment being made by hostile actors or slave/child labor in foreign countries.

Never say we can’t make/build something here. It should all be made here, instead of by shady deals with bad people who aim to destroy us.

Stupid and reckless.

I can agree with most of that. However, on the subject of solar panels, they weren't being made in volume here to being with. So those jobs were never lost.

Thinking about coal mines 100 years ago and manual labor, as things got automated, thousands of coal mining jobs went away. Those are jobs that will never come back, regardless of if coal would continue or not.

Everything changes always.

I can drive by the Studebaker plant and remember all the activity and buildings. They closed when I was a little kid. 1963. People went nuts. Then a local clothing store owner had this to say...

From this article, written my Jack Colwell. He broke the story in 1963. I had the pleasure of working with him for 30 years. He's still writing today.

(it's a great update article he wrote in 2013 on the 50th anniversary of Studebaker's closing)

Breaking the news: Studebaker closing

Like most folks in and around South Bend at the time, I’ll always remember when the news broke that Studebaker was ending auto production in the city. Especially, since I broke the news.

www.southbendtribune.com

"Most folks in and around South Bend at the time also remember the words of Paul D. Gilbert, a prominent clothing store owner who joined with Schurz to head a committee working quickly and as effectively as possible to deal with the Studebaker loss.

Gilbert’s message, far different than a warning of going down in flames, was a rallying cry: “This is not Studebaker, Indiana. This is South Bend, Indiana.” It was and it is."



My point being, everything changes. Putting your eggs in one basket rarely ends well. While the closing of Studebaker, and several other companies over the years were big blows to the community, the area rebounded and diversified its industries. Today, it continues to grow and prosper. Those that hang on to the past will get left behind.

Solar energy is just a step towards another form of power. Will it stick around as long as coal? Will nuclear finally be taken advantage of (you know I'm a pro nuclear power person as we've discussed this many times)? Is solar just a stop-gap until then or will we go back to NG or coal?

Who knows?

All I know is currently, here at least, the job market is booming. The trades are growing. Construction of factories, warehouses, power facilities, universities, apartment complexes, houses, etc., are all over the place here.

If the economy is so poor, who's living in all of these apartments and new houses? Where are they working? These aren't inexpensive homes.

I only know 1 person that is currently looking for a job, and that's because they want to stay in that particular field.

From that, I think, regardless of the numbers I read, or the pundits spewing whichever side they're hawking, things are going in a positive direction.