Tag Archives: green jobs

Creating the green jobs pipeline

Posted: September 20th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Fourteen teachers from across the Coachella Valley spent their summer vacations learning about  job opportunities in the region’s green technology field and how to design classroom projects that will ensure their students have the necessary skills and knowledge to fill them.

The summertime “externship” program is part of the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership’s Workforce Excellence program — developed in partnership with College of the Desert — which is tackling the region’s Achilles heel for diversifying the economy and drawing well-paid, green tech jobs, our underskilled workforce.

I sat in on a program recap and celebration Wednesday at the CVEP offices in Palm Springs and it was easy to get caught up in the teachers’ excitement about the program and how they’re taking their summer experiences into the classroom.

The idea behind the program is to bring teachers into direct contact with city and business leaders to talk about the kinds of jobs that may be available in green tech and what kind of job skills students will need to develop now to prepare for the positions.  The teachers who participated are already teaching in green career academies — set up through CVEP’s Career Pathways program — where students are focused on preparing themselves for green jobs or, in the case of two teachers from Indio High School, laying the groundwork to launch one.

Pathways has also started highly successful health care academies at several valley high schools, where the focus is preparing students for careers as doctors, nurses and other health care providers. The career academy program has been drawing increasing attention as a national model for its comprehensive approach to workforce development.

Programs start early in elementary and middle schools and build to the high school academies, with job shadowing, mentoring and internship opportunities for students. CVEP also stays connected to valley students who leave for college — with scholarships and local internships — so hopefully they’ll come back here to work.

Right now we have two green academies in the valley —  the Renewable Energy Academy of Learning, or REAL, at Desert Hot Springs High School and the Green Energy and Technology Academy, or GrEAT, at Desert Mirage High School in Thermal.

For the externship program, the teachers made a series of field trips, visiting geothermal sites at the Salton Sea as well as Mission Springs and the Coachella Valley water districts, the Imperial Irrigation District and the cities of Coachella, Palm Desert and Desert Hot Springs to find out about their energy efficiency and renewable energy programs.

The teachers also got coaching in project-based learning, said Donna Sturgeon, Career Pathways’ work-based learning coordinator. Starting with the information about the kinds of jobs that will be available in a specific green tech field, such as water conservation, the teachers take the basic skills the students will need for such jobs and work backwards, breaking them down into smaller, discrete tasks or skills that can all be linked to a class project. The project-related tasks and skills are also linked to state-mandated learning standards.

So at Desert Hot Springs REAL program, Todd Berg, a career technical teacher, has his students working on designing a grey water recycling system for the school’s car wash system, to take dirty water and recycle it for other uses, rather than just leaving it as polluted run-off.  The tasks involved range from figuring out what kind of grey water system might be needed, researching options, finding out about the legalities — what kind of permits might be needed — and creating blueprints of the system.

But the program is not just technical. Brian Martin, a social studies teacher who took part in the summer externship, is focusing on the impact of clean water on communities, having his sophomores and juniors look at the role of water systems in the growth of cities and how clean water is regulated.

Similarly, Elisa Santillan and Renee Miletic, English teachers at Desert Mirage’s GrEAT program, are now working with their students on presentation and communication skills, working up to interview skills, they said.

The skills Miletic is focusing on include “being able to explain things and answering questions; being in situations where they are in competition, making it into an opportunity to connect with other people,” she said.

The GrEAT program is having a big impact at Desert Mirage, where 90 percent of the students are low-income. Now in its third year, the academy has 100 students, including its first group of 25 seniors.

The programs are getting both teachers and students excited. One teacher at Wednesday’s event  talked about having to practically throw his kids out of the classroom — they wanted to stay after school to keep working on their projects.

Beyond preparing students for green jobs, CVEP’s program is busting many of the stereotypes about the valley’s low-income students — that they don’t have the smarts, motivation or discipline to succeed. For the teachers, it’s an opportunity to raise their professional expertise and “orient themselves twoard the new industry,” said Larry McLaughlin, director of COD’s Desert Energy Enterprise Center in North Palm Springs.

Kim McNulty, program manager for Career Pathways, noted that the valley has 71,000 K-12 students, 20,000 of them in high school and 3,000 of those in career academies.

What Career Pathways is doing is showing these kids that education — math, science, English, the basic skills — aren’t just dry subjects; they have real-world applications that can open doors for themselves and their families, while building diverse, sustainable jobs and communities across the valley.

 

 

 

 

 

Solar studies: The good, the bad, etc.

Posted: February 10th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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I’m not sure if it’s election year posturing – the renewable energy industry is lobbying Congress heavily to preserve key financial incentives such as the production tax credit – or a push back from the Solyndra bankruptcy, but it seems barely a day goes by without some solar study landing in my email box.

What’s clear is that advocates for solar and the green economy in general are positioning the sector as a job creator that, in California, is growing faster than other traditional industry sectors. How good or effective the studies are depends on how closely they reflect what’s really going on –- and provide useful information –- rather than trying to oversell the impact of green jobs or manipulate public perceptions.

In the latter category, we have a study released Thursday — with support from Vote Solar, a nonprofit promoting local policies that increase the number of solar installations — billed as a survey of public attitudes toward solar development.

What I found instead is a poll funded by a major solar corporation, BrightSource Energy, with softball questions designed to elicit desired answers.

Case in point, the first question in the poll asked participants if they  agree or disagree with the following statements:

“California’s deserts are a great resource. We should use parts of them to develop renewable energy projects. “

No surprise, 78.6 percent of respondents agreed, while only 15.6 percent disagreed and 5.8 percent were unsure or refused to answer.

Wonder what the answers would have been if the question had been phrased as follows:

“California’s deserts are a great resource, with incredible visual vistas and habitat for endangered and unique desert plants and animals. Should we put thousands of solar panels there or on previously disturbed land?”

Yes, that’s a loaded question looking for a specific answer, but serves the point.

The irony here is that of the major solar developers, BrightSource has been one of the few to place some of its projects on previously disturbed land – like the company’s 750-megawatt Rio Mesa project now in the works on private land near Blythe.

The study also tries to tip the balance of public opinion by linking solar development with the creation of “thousands of local construction jobs for two to three years, and . . . between 80 to 100 permanent operations and maintenance jobs.” Respondents were then asked if knowing that makes them more or less likely to support large-scale solar.

Once again, 73.4 percent came down on the more likely side, 10.5 percent less likely, 8.6 percent no difference and 7.5 percent unsure or refusing to answer.

Time for a reality check here — and another, more realistic study on solar industry jobs, from the Centers for Excellence, a research and analysis outfit that provides California’s community colleges with information aimed at aligning curriculum and programs with job market needs.

Also released Thursday, this study is based on surveys and interviews with large and small solar companies across the state, along with analysis of relevant community college programs.  The good news here is that solar jobs have been growing faster than the general job market.

The study found that the state’s 2,000 solar firms employ around 50,000 workers, with another 18,000 jobs expected by 2015 — a healthy 36 percent increase.  But, the study’s breakdown by region found Southern California growth rates lower, with 8 percent growth projected for 2012 and 19 percent by 2015.

Other sobering findings — for large-scale solar projects, contractors often bring in their own crews from out of state — as has happened at NextEra Energy’s Genesis project, a 250-megawatt solar thermal plant about half way between Desert Center and Blythe. 

When Desert Sun photographer Richard Lui and I visited the site last week, one of the first things we noticed was that almost all the pick-up trucks on site had Minnesota license plates, cause that’s where the general contractor is headquartered.  We were told about 50 people on the site were from Minnesota — though some had brought their families out and are now living here — and the balance of workers on the site came through union hiring halls in Riverside and Orange County. 

Another nifty factoid, solar installers tend to hire skilled trades people — electricians, roofers and plumbers – with solar skills, along with specifically trained solar installers.  No surprise then that many students in College of the Desert’s solar training programs have been unemployed construction workers, and that the class prepares them to pass the basic certification test of the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners — aka NABCEP — a strong resume point for solar installers.

But along with installers, the job categories people will need training for in solar may be more in sales, system design and administration, the study found.

Moving to the green job market statewide, Next 10, another nonprofit, released its employment survey, called “Many Shades of Green” earlier this week.  What’s good about this study is that it looks not only at what the group calls the core green economy — such as jobs directly related to renewable energy, energy-efficiency and recycling — but also the secondary, adaptive green economy, which includes businesses that are going green, asking their vendors for greener products or coming up with more sustainable business practices.

The major drawback to this study is that its figures are about two years old — providing job stats only up to 2010. Like the rest of California’s economy, the green sector took its hits in 2009, but had fewer job losses. Overall, the study says, job figures for the state were down 7 percent in 2009, versus just 3 percent in the green economy.

The Inland Empire was one of only three areas in the state where the green economy did worse than other sectors. While overall, the green economy in San Bernardino and Riverside counties has grown 43 percent since 1995, in 2009, green jobs went down 7 percent versus 5 percent for the rest of the economy in the region.

Next 10 did not have breakout figures for Riverside County, but Tracy Gosse, who authored the study, said the region was one of the hardest hit in the recession. In 2009, the area saw drops in business at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, on top of the region’s moribund housing market.  Presumably, 2010-2011 figures, when available, will show some growth.

Still, what the study does show, without overselling or manipulating data, is that the green economy is growing as energy efficiency, renewable energy and recycling all go mainstream and are integrated into the supply chain and, that in many cases, its growth is bottom-line driven.

When Walmart places third on EPA’s list of the top 50 U.S. businesses buying renewable energy — with 75 percent of its California stores having some kind of renewable generation — then green jobs expand and other jobs become greener.

As Andrew Winston, a green business blogger at the Harvard Business Review website, noted in a recent post –

“If the lords of low cost recognize the strategic value of green investments, so can the rest of us. ”

 

Staying sane about Solyndra

Posted: September 15th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: The Green Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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I got an email from a reader recently taking me to task for my lack of comment about Solyndra, the Northern California solar company that went bankrupt at the end of August and is now at the center of a political feeding frenzy in Congress and the media.

The Republicans clearly smell blood and the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, President Barack Obama and solar technology in general are the bait.

Are there balanced views to be had out there?

A good starting point is Brad Plumer’s blog post “Five myths about the Solyndra collapse” on The Washington Post website, which does a lot of wheat and chaff separating, from the White House’s role in pushing the loan approval (a qualified maybe) to whether we can blame it all on China (convenient, but no).

The key point he makes is on the question of whether the government should be involved in renewable energy financing.

Plumer writes: “Actually, there’s reason to think the private market is drastically under-investing in new energy technology. As a new report from the American Energy Innovation Council lays out, the utility sector spends just 0.1 percent of its revenues on R&D — the average for U.S. industries is 3.5 percent. The electricity sector is heavily regulated and capital-intensive — power plants last for decades and turn over slowly — and hence tends to focus less on innovation. What’s more, many objectives that may be in the public interest, such as reducing carbon emissions, aren’t fully valued in the marketplace right now.

“As such, the AEIC report concludes, “Energy innovation should be a higher national priority.” Right now, the federal government spends a middling amount on energy research (about $3 billion in 2009), compared with the sums lavished on the National Institutes of Health ($36.5 billion) or defense research ($77 billion). And the AEIC report recommends public support for all aspects of the innovation process, from basic research to pilot projects to helping companies commercialize their products. (Solyndra was in that last phase.)”

Marian Wang on Pro Publica also has put together a good recap of what’s happened to date, with lots of links to primary documents such as the Republicans’ investigation released Wednesday and the Government Accountability Office’s 2010 report on the DOE loan guarantee program.

Wang’s most trenchant observation comes on the issue of the U.S. government’s track record as an investor:

“Ultimately,” she writes, “Solyndra was a failed investment decision on the part of the government, which, unfortunately for taxpayers, isn’t unusual. Consider the billions in bailout dollars that were lent to banks that, like Solyndra, ended up bankrupt.”

Along the same lines, GreenTech Media has a chart comparing the government’s loss on Solyndra to the billions it’s shelled out for military boondoggles. I tried to download it so I could include it in this post, but it’s just too big, so get a look by clicking here.

I could probably spend the rest of the day on the Internet reviewing the Solyndra press, but I’ll end here with a link to Darren Samuelsohn’s piece on Politico.com, talking with renewable energy leaders and other political folk about the public relations’ nightmare the scandal has created for the clean energy industry in general.

Paul Bledsoe of the Bipartisan Policy Center gets to the heart of the matter with his argument that the main misstep for Obama and the Democrats was to promote the loan guarantee program as a jobs creator.

As quoted in Samuelsohn’s article, Bledsoe said renewable energy advocates are suffering from unfair expectations and budget debates best described as “famine-feast-famine.”

“The real problem was trying to sell incentives for clean energy narrowly on the basis of a green jobs program,” he said. “I think that put a level of expectation on the sector that was unrealistic and was never really the primary focus on incentives for clean energy in the early years.”

With the stimulus funding, “you try to get a decade worth of funding done in 18 months,” Bledsoe added. “It’s inevitable there are going to be mistakes.”

Which is not to say that the green economy — including solar, wind and green building– is not creating jobs, as noted in an email blast the Natural Resources Defense Council sent out on Solyndra.

Some of the figures:           

– In 2009, there were 2.2 million green jobs in America, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By July of this year, the number was 2.7 million, according to the Brookings Institution. That compares with 375,000 jobs mining coal, producing oil and gas and turning fossil fuels into consumer products.

– About 87,000 Americans now support their families by designing, building or installing wind turbines, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, we’re getting 3.3 percent of our electricity from wind, according to August data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Texas, the oil capital of the world, now gets 8 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, and those projects are helping to keep ranchers and farmers viable as well.

 – As of 2005, green building projects in the U.S. were worth about $3 billion a year. Today it’s about $54 billion. In 2015, this will be a $145-billion market, according to McGraw Hill Construction. By then, green construction will support as many as 8 million American jobs, according to estimates by Booz Allen.