Green New Deal Plan - Renewable Energy System - Interstate Wind System

Total And manufacturing jobs for Interstate Wind System

In general we can estimate the number of jobs a wind system would create by estimating the number of jobs created per gigawatt wind capacity. We estimate on the wind cost page that that we need 1,500 Gigawatts of capacity.

The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), in "High Wind Penetration Impact on U.S. Wind Manufacturing Capacity and Critical Resources", p.22, estimates that 4,300 full-time jobs are created per gigawatt of capacity of wind power. The Renewable Energy Policy Project (REPP) estimates in a report (p. 46) that one gigawatt yields the need for 3,000 manufacturing jobs, and since they estimate that manufacturing accounts for 70% of wind employment per dollar, then about 4,300 jobs total are required for each gigawatt of wind capacity. 17% of jobs are for installation, and 13% for operations and maintenance

According to REPP, each gigawatt would break down this way in terms of need for workers:

Manufacturing: 3,000
Installation: 700
Operations/Maint:600

We need 1,500 gigawatts over 20 years, or 75 gigawatts per year. For the first year, this would translate into:

Manufacturing: 225,000
Installation: 52,500
Operations/Maint:45,000
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Total 322,500

The operations and maintenance staff would increase by 45,000 every year until the 20th year; we would still be manufacturing and installing 75 gigawatts per year on the 21st year, since in the 21st year we would start to retire the wind turbines built in the 1st year. So in the 21st year we would have the following employment totals:

Manufacturing: 225,000
Installation: 52,500
Operations/Maint:900,000
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Total 1,177,500

However, let's assume that the first years would have more manufacturing, thus we would still average about 1.2 million jobs per year.