Fossil fuels and nuclear

 An understanding of the international coal trade is important to make projections for how a switch to renewable energy will affect energy sector jobs around the world. The full ISF Report for this study provides detail on all the factors we used to calculate the employment related to coal powered electricity generation16. These include:

• employment and production data for as many of the major coal producing countries as possible
• proportion of lignite in current electricity production
• international trade, import and domestic coal production proportions
• proportion of domestic coal production
• the amount of “new’ electricity generation in any given year (that is generation above the 2005 baseline

The global trend for energy generation from coal is for bigger mines that  employ fewer people. China, the world’s fastest developing economy is expected to close at least 10,000 small mines, and will develop 16 super mines that will produce an average of 70 million tonnes per year each. Of course, the older-style rural mines rely on a lot more manual labour. For comparison, a village miner in China produces 100 tonnes per year, while a single worker in one of the large Chinese super mines produces 30,000tons per year. Examples of average production in other places is 14,000tonnes per year in the US and 13,800 tonnes per year in Australia.

There is a significant reduction in coal sector jobs by 2020 and 2030under both scenarios.

under the Reference scenario jobs in coal go down by more than a third by 2020 despite 40% more generation. By 2030 there is a further reduction of 200,000 jobs. The reasons are:

• Jobs per MW across all technologies falls as prosperity and labour productivity increases. In the model, regional job multipliers are applied to OECD employment factors in non-OECD regions to reflect this. As labour productivity reaches a par with OECD countries, employment per MW falls to OECD levels. If no  regional multiplier is used, coal employment by 2020 only drops by 5% relative to 2010, rather than 32%. That would model a future where China’s projected rapid increase in labour productivity does not occur.
• The decline factors applied to each technology reflect the reduction in price of that technology. An annual decline of 0.9% is applied  between 2010 and 2020 and 0.3% between 2020 and 2030. If no decline factors are used then coal employment falls by 25% rather than 32% between 2020 and 2030.
• Because annual growth in coal generation falls from 71 GW per year in 2010 to 58 GW per year in 2020, construction and manufacturing jobs. If growth was maintained coal sector jobs would fall only 26% rather than the 32% projected.

Under the [R]evolution scenario, growth in coal capacity is almost zero, and by 2030 there is a slight reduction in coal capacity, so there would be a correlating reduction in coal sector jobs. Consequently, the installation and manufacturing jobs in the coal sector would fall to almost zero. The same influences that operate in the Reference scenario compound the losses that would occur for an Energy[R]evolution. The key point of this study is that this loss is off-set by very high labour projections in renewable energy, which would not occur if coal is allowed to continue to dominate the global energy mix.

gas, oil and diesel and nuclear Unsurprisingly, there are  corresponding large drops in gas, oil and diesel and nuclear energy jobs under an Energy [R]evolution scenario.

• For gas, global employment is projected to increase by more than 30% between 2010 and 2030 under “business as usual”.Under the Energy [R]evolution, gas plays an important role as a transition fuel, so there would be more jobs in 2010 than under the Reference scenario (1.63 million compared to 1.59 million).However, by 2030 there are 1.97 jobs in the sector, 220,000 less than without the [R]evolution measures.
• For oil and diesel jobs drop quite sharply, as we must reduce dependence on the volatile oil markets. Jobs in 2030 would be about90,000, around 40% less than without the measures to curb emissions.
• For nuclear, annual investment would drop to zero by 2030, with a corresponding sharp decline in employment in the sector.