As others have already ventured, it's an artifact of solar's rapid growth. Solar at steady state does not look very labor intensive. (I apologize if you've seen me post the analysis below before; the issue keeps coming up.)

Coal plants, particularly the older ones most at risk of closure in the US, require significantly more labor per MWh generated than cleaner sources.

Here's a recently announced coal plant closure: http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099...

...

the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.

...

According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an annualized average power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.

A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm

https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressr... ("Expected to create up to... 15 permanent jobs")

This assumes that the labor is all associated with keeping the 1.3% running at that level, as opposed to being associated with the rapid growth of solar. That's almost certainly not the case: things like sales and installation would be mostly associated with new solar (although, of course, eventually this stuff will need to be maintained and/or reinstalled).

> I'm sure that there are higher labor costs installing solar vs running established coal plants... but that's 70x the labor of coal.

So? As you mention, the labor in solar is going into construction, solar panels being almost maintenance-free once installed. If we were building a lot of new coal-fired plants, coal employment would be much higher than it is.

The relevant number is total lifetime cost per kWh, where I gather solar is getting pretty competitive.

That's what I was thinking. It's not really a good thing if it takes a huge amount more people to generate the same amount of power.

It's tricky to compare though. Consider.

The cost of coal is mostly the cost of the raw material inputs. And coal has a significant off the books negative externalilty because of CO2 emissions and environmental destruction.

vs

Solar which has a high labor cost component. Noting that providing jobs for large numbers of lower skilled workers is an off the books positive externality.

If you want jobs, there's an enormous amount of potential employment in converting to solar. There's likely to be two or three rounds of build-out before the panels are "good enough" and stabilize in some roughly fixed form, so there may be generations of work ahead.

At some point people will have installed capacity that only needs minor maintenance and these jobs can shift to other sectors.

In what way is employing people in an offical capacity (you pay them, withhold income tax, holiday pay, health cover, superannuation (401k or whatever you call it) off the books?

Don't these data get reported to government, and worker on academic and corporate economists? Who endeavour to account for the effects of employment in an econo-socio-politio-historic evaluation of the world.

> off the books?

It's counted as a 'cost' but over the big picture it's not.

It's like this economics teaches us that labor is a cost to be minimized. All good and well except if workers have no money they can't buy anything.

Yep. If we want to employ a lot of people producing power we should just have people ride exercise bikes.

The very premise of a great Rick and Morty episode [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/embed/l2bU_tOREos?vndel=watch&vndapp...

And Black Mirror [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits

You're not doing the math right. You're comparing the cost to install capacity versus the cost of sustaining it.

How many jobs are there in the US for making coal-fired power plants?

How many jobs are there in the us for mining sunlight for use on solar panels?

The numbers are misleading because solar is on the upswing, whereas the opposite is true for coal; it takes a ton more work to increase generation than it does to slowly decline.

It's competitive right now in places with favorable sun.