Students in the U.S. begin getting themselves ready for boom in green jobs
Sunday, February 01, 2009
So says an article from ABC news here:
With President Barack Obama's pledge this week to renew the U.S. economy and jump-start the nation's clean energy future, it's a job outlook that's pretty bright.Across the country, hundreds of thousands of students, those with jobs and those in search of good work, are now "greening" their skill set in hopes of competing for a host of environmentally friendly jobs, from electricians and metal workers to environmental scientists.
Some of the most promising money-makers are in the fields of wind power development and manufacturing, solar power, fuel cells (low polluters which generate electrical power quietly and efficiently) and, of course, biofuels.
This makes sense, as you can see on the following chart that even though the U.S. is in first place for total amount of wind power generated, it's still lagging behind in terms of power generated per capita so there's a lot of room to catch up with other countries like Germany and Denmark. The US for example has 55 times the population of Denmark, so if it were producing the same amount of wind power per capita in 2007 it would have produced 172,000 MW instead of 22,247, or almost eight times more.
Compared to Germany the U.S. has 3.8 times the population, so that would mean 91,000 MW in 2008.
This is one of the reasons why I'm still hopeful about the American economy in the near future, because it really does have the potential to move from a mostly non-renewable resource-based economy to one that doesn't depend so much on the fluctuations of overseas politics and resulting energy prices, and all it requires in the short term is simply adopting what a number of Western European countries have already done, as opposed to creating something completely new.
Installed windpower capacity (MW) | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Rank | Nation | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 |
1 | Germany | 18,415 | 20,622 | 22,247 | 23,902 |
2 | United States | 9,149 | 11,603 | 16,818 | 25,170 |
3 | Spain | 10,028 | 11,615 | 15,145 | |
4 | India | 4,430 | 6,270 | 8,000 | |
5 | China | 1,260 | 2,604 | 6,050 | 13,242.2 |
6 | Denmark (& Faeroe Islands) | 3,136 | 3,140 | 3,129 | |
7 | Italy | 1,718 | 2,123 | 2,726 | |
8 | France | 757 | 1,567 | 2,454 | |
9 | United Kingdom | 1,332 | 1,963 | 2,389 | |
10 | Portugal | 1,022 | 1,716 | 2,150 | |
11 | Canada | 683 | 1,459 | 1,856 | |
12 | Netherlands | 1,219 | 1,560 | 1,747 | |
13 | Japan | 1,061 | 1,394 | 1,538 | |
14 | Austria | 819 | 965 | 982 | |
15 | Greece | 573 | 746 | 871 | |
16 | Australia | 708 | 817 | 824 | |
17 | Ireland | 496 | 745 | 805 | |
18 | Sweden | 510 | 572 | 788 | |
19 | Norway | 267 | 314 | 333 | |
20 | New Zealand | 169 | 171 | 322 | |
21 | Egypt | 145 | 230 | 310 | |
22 | Belgium | 167 | 193 | 287 | |
23 | Taiwan | 104 | 188 | 282 | |
24 | Poland | 83 | 153 | 276 | |
25 | Brazil | 29 | 237 | 247 | |
26 | South Korea | 98 | 173 | 191 | |
27 | Turkey | 20 | 51 | 146 | |
28 | Czech Republic | 28 | 50 | 116 | |
29 | Morocco | 64 | 124 | 114 | |
30 | Finland | 82 | 86 | 110 | 143 |
31 | Ukraine | 77 | 86 | 89 | |
32 | Mexico | 3 | 88 | 87 | |
33 | Costa Rica | 71 | 74 | 74 | |
34 | Bulgaria | 6 | 36 | 70 | |
35 | Iran | 23 | 48 | 66 | |
36 | Hungary | 18 | 61 | 65 | |
Rest of Europe | 129 | 163 | |||
Rest of Americas | 109 | 109 | |||
Rest of Asia | 38 | 38 | |||
Rest of Africa & Middle East | 31 | 31 | |||
Rest of Oceania | 12 | 12 | |||
World total (MW) | 59,091 | 74,223 | 93,849 |
0 comments:
Post a Comment