The Next Economy: Green Energy Jobs Driven by NY State
Over at TAP, writer Nb41 found some goodness in Paterson’s State of the State:
Anyway, in one of the better moments, The Gov said that he wants NY to achieve 45% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2015…only 7 years away. Cool, setting a decent goal, not these wimped out namby-pamby goals like 20% by 2020 or 2030 (http://www.newwindagenda.org/ ). Actually, we could do better than 45% by 2015, but exceeding expectations is perfectly allowed in this case.
Actually, it is not as difficult to achieve as it seems. NY on average uses about 16.5 GW for 19.5 million people, so we are above average with respect to efficiency, but there is room for improvement there. 45% of 16.5 GW would be 7.5 GW. There is also about 3 GW of renewable electricity made, including Niagara Falls (1.4 GW), the St Lawrence River (0.8 GW), some miscellaneous hydro (at least 0.3 GW) and we should have about 1300 GW of wind operating in a few weeks (seehttp://awea.org/projects/Proje… which would deliver about 0.4 GW. So we start off with a need to get 4.5 GW delivered.
For wind, that would be 15 GW (15,000 MW) of wind capacity delivering at an average of 30%. That would cost about $30 billion in parts and installation, and would be a great stimulant to our economy, which could definitely use it. Who knows, with $20 to $25 billion in new wind turbine sales in the next 7 years (the rest is installation), maybe we could get a wind turbine factory or new in this state!!!!! After all, jobs are good, and we could use the jobs, especially good jobs. Maybe convert some of those abandoned auto and auto parts factories, old boiler factories, old steel plant sites, etc now serving as wind turbine parts (made elsewhere) warehouses/storage sites.
Good stuff. One thing I’d really like to see is subsidies for converting homes over to geothermal heating/cooling. These typically can provide 400% efficiency, vs. 75-95% efficiency for fossil fuel furnaces. I had an estimate done on my house a few years back by a local company who had done quite a few residential geothermal installations, and the pricetag was about $12k. I calculated a 7-year breakeven point (even after the $2k geothermal tax credit), after which it would start saving money. A more recent estimate from Isaac Heating (who just started doing geothermal) put the price at $20-25k.
Assuming a price tag closer to the initial quote, some state investment (with matching federal dollars) into a fund to offset the price of installation might be all we need to create a tipping point where it’s a no-brainer to convert to geo-thermal.
And that’s a lotta HVAC jobs right there, with the economy, environment, and homeowners benefitting. RG&E might not be happy about it, though. :-)
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