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


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