| The human labor required to produce a MWh of electricity from utility-scale wind or solar plants is significantly less than the labor that went into producing it from older fossil plants. The growing employment numbers you see in solar/wind right now are mostly an artifact of rapid expansion. American coal plant construction employment is about zero right now and all you see is the operational labor; solar/wind are growing quickly and what you mostly see are the temporary construction jobs. See e.g. my comment here (search for "Nucla"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13749769 A utility scale solar farm can be more than an order of magnitude more productive per employee than an old coal plant. So can a utility scale wind farm. MidAmerican's Wind VIII project has 40 permanent jobs and generated 3,622,316 MWh in 2016 (10.33 real annualized megawatts per employee). https://www.midamericanenergy.com/content/pdf/wind_facts.pdf https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58883/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58884/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58885/ https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/58886/ (The EIA data for Wind VIII is spread across these sub-projects.) Utility-scale wind and solar are also thriftier with labor than nuclear plants. Old coal plant: 0.87 real annualized MW/full time employee (0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the fuel mining jobs) New AP1000 reactors at Vogtle, assuming 90% capacity factor: 2.5 real MW/FTE Desert Sunlight solar farm: 9.8 real MW/FTE Wind VIII wind complex: 10.3 real MW/FTE |