It is still common to hear that one of the disadvantages of renewables is that they do not create good new jobs. ‘Old’ industries, such as coal mining or power station operation, are portrayed as better for employment than solar or wind.

We saw one example yesterday. Sarah O’Connor of the Financial Times wrote an article (paywall) suggesting that jobs would be lost in the energy transition. She wrote

‘Wind farms, once up and running, do not require as much labour as digging-up coal’.

But is this right? Or are we all stuck with memories of photographs from the 1950s of huge numbers of blackened miners pouring out of collieries at the end of a shift?

The application to develop a new metallurgical coal mine in the north of England gives us some useful data. The proposed mine in Cumbria is said to offer a maximum of 500 permanent jobs. So I estimated whether the energy produced per employee would be more or less than that typically produced by the people running, repairing and maintaining wind farms. The evidence is that employees working at operational wind farms are responsible for less energy production per person. In other words, Ms O’Connor’s assertion is not correct; wind farms will actually need far more labour than modern coal mining to give us the energy we need.

Cumbria mine

Employees 500 employees

Projected coal output per year 3.1 million tonnes

Coal output per employee 6,200 tonnes

Energy value of metallurgical coal 8.3 MWh per tonne

Energy value per employee year 51,460 MWh

Wind farm operations and maintenance (NOT construction)

Estimate average number of employees per MW of capacity[1] 0.29

Typical annual output per megawatt of capacity[2] 3,504 MWh

Typical output per person employed 12,083 MWh

To deliver all the energy an economy uses will therefore require more employment in wind farms than in mines. In fact, over four times as many people are needed to run wind farms than to operate a new coal mine in the UK.

[1] Source Page 17 of Wind Power and Job Creation, L. Aldieri, 2020.

[2] At a 40% capacity factor