Prince Salman's Solar Science Project And Jobs -- The Rest Of The Story -- February 7, 2018

I love it when the dots connect.

Yesterday: Saudi Arabia announced a $7 billion solar energy project. The population problem that Prince Salman is facing was not mentioned in the New York Times story linked at that post. If one reads the NYT story closely, one will notice a reference to "jobs" as a reason for the project but the reference is buried in the story and easily missed.

How big is the population problem that Prince Salman is facing?

Yesterday: the population problem Prince Salman is facing.

Today: Here's the dot that connects the population problem (i.e., jobs for all those people) and the $7 billion solar energy project, over at AEI, last year, May 3, 2017. In the United States,

Despite a huge workforce of almost 400,000 solar workers (about 20 percent of electric power payrolls in 2016), that sector produced an insignificant share, less than 1 percent, of the electric power generated in the United States last year. And that’s a lot of solar workers: about the same as the combined number of employees working at Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer, Ford Motor Company and Procter & Gamble.

In contrast, it took about the same number of natural gas workers (398,235) last year to produce more than one-third of U.S. electric power, or 37 times more electricity than solar’s minuscule share of 0.90 percent. And with only 160,000 coal workers (less than half the number of workers in either solar or gas), that sector produced nearly one-third (almost as much as gas) of U.S. electricity last year.

Graphically, from AEI:

I think we all knew that Prince Salman's Saudi solar science project was all about jobs, but until I saw the graphic I had no idea how big a deal such a project could be.