electricity grids

By Jonathan Porritt, Suzanne Jeffery, Katrine Williams, and Ian Ralls - Greater Manchester Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, June 29, 2022

By Liz Burdock, Ross Gould and Sam Salustro - Labor Energy Partnership, June 2022

Accelerating the growth of the U.S. offshore wind supply chain is critical to achieving national and state-level energy goals and will require a national strategy to succeed. This paper, titled Advancing Policy Measures to Drive Development of the Domestic Offshore Wind Supply Chain, assesses how current policies impact potential supply chain businesses and what is needed to help them retool or gain the capabilities needed to build out the U.S. offshore wind industry and compete in the global market. Secondary market forces, such as federal leasing processes and transmission capacities, play an important role in efforts to accelerate supply chain development and are discussed. This paper is informed by specific and general conversations with Network members actively working to build out a sustainable and competitive offshore wind supply chain. These insights are augmented by research into current global and European policies impacting the United States market and into comparable renewable energy technologies and their successes or failures in growing a domestic supply chain.

By Sean Sweeney, et. al. - Labor Network for Sustainability, May 31, 2022

Web Editor's Note: this webinar discussion focuses on TUED Working Paper #14. Some of the arguments made by the presenters seem to frame advocates of locally controlled, decentralized distributed energy as "unwittingly plaing into the hands of neoliberalism", which is a debatable position (and one that some of the other attendeees push back on). 

By Jim Stanford. - Center for Future Work, May 26, 2022

A new report from the David Suzuki Foundation takes a deep dive into the employment gains that could be achieved through the rapid electrification of Canada’s economy, driven by the expansion of sustainable power generation and infrastructure. The new report, “Shifting Power: Zero-Emissions Electricity Across Canada by 2035”, estimates that 75,000 net new jobs would be created by the expansion of clean electricity generation and use over a 15-year period. This would contribute substantially to the attainment of Canada’s net-zero objectives, as well as to strengthening employment outcomes for Canadian workers as the economy shifts toward sustainable energy sources.

Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford provided a supplementary analysis for the report, addressing the economic and employment opportunities associated with decarbonized electrification. He notes those benefits would occur through several complementary channels:

• Jobs in developing and operating renewable generation systems (including solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric power). Construction of these projects will create hundreds of thousands of person-years, with thousands more ongoing jobs in operation and maintenance.
• New work in expanding and upgrading the electric grid. Major investments will be required to upgrade transmission facilities, install modern control and regulating equipment and prepare the grid for the more complex and variable power distribution requirements associated with dispersed renewable generation.
• Manufacturing of capital equipment and other material inputs to renewable generation projects. With appropriate value-added industrial strategies to enhance Canada’s industrial footprint in these growing industries, thousands of permanent jobs would be created manufacturing wind turbines, solar power equipment, transmission equipment and materials, and other capital inputs to electrification.
• Installation and maintenance of new equipment that uses electricity in various industrial and consumer applications — everything from residential heating systems to electric vehicles to large industrial power systems.
• Jobs in new industries attracted to Canada by the availability of clean, reliable and competitive electricity. Canada’s abundance of primary renewable electricity resources would position us at the forefront of the global transition to sustainable electric energy. That will stimulate interest and investment by industrial firms and financial investors from around the world.

Overstated and misleading warnings that shifting away from fossil fuel use will inevitably cause major job losses and dislocation have already been disproved by the progress in decarbonizing electricity that has already been made. Stanford notes that reliance on fossil fuels in electricity generation in Canada has already fallen by one-third since the turn of the century – yet the electricity generation and distribution industry has created 10,000 net new jobs over that same period. And since renewable energy sources, in general, are more labour-intensive than fossil fuels, this continuing shift can be expected to produce more net job gains in the years ahead.

Jim Stanford’s full commentary for the Shifting Power report is posted here. For more details, please see the Suzuki Foundation’s full report, “Shifting Power: Zero-Emissions Electricity Across Canada by 2035”

By Thomas Hanna, Johanna Bozuwa, and Raj Rao - The Climate and Community Project, April 2022

Publicly and cooperatively owned electric utilities (community utilities) have the potential to demonstrate what an equitable, clean energy system looks like in the United States. They could become powerful “anchor institutions” in their community by grounding their decisions in democratic governance and community partnership, affordable energy and community wealth building, and access to renewable energy.

The United States urgently needs to transition off of fossil fuels and onto clean sources of energy (especially renewable energy) to maintain a livable climate. As of 2020, only around 20% of US electricity generation is from renewable energy sources. Energy utilities – the companies that run our power systems – have enormous control over the scope and scale of the transition, but have often dragged their feet or even fought against clean energy. Not only does their inaction imperil the very future of humanity, but it directly harms families – often Black, Indigenous, low income, or otherwise marginalized – who live in the shadow of toxic power plants. The current US energy system is dirty and expensive. 31% of households in the country have to make the choice between buying groceries or paying their energy bills. In response, communities across the country are beginning to mobilize to demand an energy transition.

We have a powerful tool to accelerate the energy transition in a way that builds community wealth and energy justice in our communities: publicly and cooperatively- owned energy utilities. In this report, we refer to these types of utilities as “community utilities” because they are owned by the local community. Around thirty percent of households in the United States get their energy from community utilities. This is no small part of our energy system. As non-profit utilities without faraway shareholders that are ultimately accountable to the local community, these utilities have the potential to be an example for what an equitable, clean, and democratic energy system could look like. Collective action and organizing to push community utilities toward the intersections of clean/ renewable energy and community development can be more tractable than in corporate utility areas because community utilities’ mandate is to provide a public good, not to maximize profits for shareholders.

Community utilities and cooperatives have a radical history. In the early days of electrification one hundred years ago, residents across the country rose up against profiteering private utilities who provided poor (or nonexistent) service at high prices by creating their own publicly and cooperatively owned utilities. In the state of Nebraska, for instance, they kicked all private utilities out of the state for good. To this day, there are no private utilities providing electricity to Nebraskan homes. This cause was, in turn, taken up by national leaders. For instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt started the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) after rural communities pushed for access to light in their regions. Before that, corporate actors didn’t want to enter rural areas because they didn’t see how they could profit from such unpopulated land. The REA program took electrification from ten to ninety percent in ten years as groups of farmers banded together to start their own electric cooperatives, run on cooperative principles. However, today some community utilities have forgotten their past and are not living up to their potential. Many still rely on fossil fuel energy and some have even pushed back against important climate resiliency approaches like rooftop solar. In some places, democratic governance structures have deteriorated (or been manipulated by powerful interests) and residents don’t even know that they actually own their utility. It is time to reignite the radical history of community utilities to herald the transition to a genuinely democratic, equitable, and clean energy system.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Casey Williams - In These Times, March 31, 2022

Can South Africa transition from a reliance on coal to clean power while maintaining jobs? The energy workers fighting for a just transition think so.

The lights went out around Johannesburg on a Monday morning in November 2021, not to flicker back on until early that Friday in some areas. It marked the last rolling blackout of a year troubled by more outages than any in recent memory. The fate of Eskom, the beleaguered power utility behind the crisis, is now at the center of South Africa’s struggle for a just energy transition — a break from fossil fuels without leaving behind frontline communities or energy workers.

As a public company, Eskom has a constitutional mandate to guarantee electricity as a basic right. But the utility struggles to meet that mandate with its aging equipment, staggering debt, corruption and rules that require it to break even, which drive exorbitant rate hikes. Moreover, the electricity running through Eskom’s wires comes almost entirely from coal, smothering the country’s eastern coal belt in deadly pollution and adding planet-warming emissions to the atmosphere — and putting the utility at odds with South Africa’s decarbonization commitments and global calls for renewable energy. South Africa, the 26^th-largest country by population, ranks 14^th in carbon output worldwide and is responsible for 1% of global emissions, because of this reliance on coal.

Few believe Eskom will survive in its current state, and what comes next is the subject of a high-stakes debate — and is about more than the climate. The state-owned company employs 45,000 workers and supports 82,000 coal jobs in a country where more than a third of the population is out of work. Eskom is a union shop, as are South Africa’s biggest coal mines.

The government’s plan, already underway, is to invite private companies into the energy sector on the dubious grounds that clean energy is bound to win in a competitive market. The powerful miners and metalworkers unions oppose privatization, which they worry will hobble their organizations, if not eliminate the jobs they’re entrusted to protect. 

The unions have reason to worry. European multinationals have installed most of South Africa’s wind and solar capacity so far, importing technicians and hardware. The local jobs that come with them are often low-paid and temporary, vanishing once plants get up and running. Workers with permanent jobs, meanwhile, have struggled with for-profit energy companies over the right to strike.

While some union leaders and workers have responded to the threat of privatization by defending coal mines and the union jobs they offer, unions also say they support decarbonization efforts. There are currents within the labor movement organizing for a just transition to turn Eskom into a unionized, public and clean power utility, run by and for the South African people.

This tug-of-war holds lessons for workers everywhere: The South African labor movement has largely succeeded in making the public debate about ownership and power— about who owns energy resources and who decides how they’re used — rather than simply about renewables versus coal. Still, the temptation for labor to double down on coal jobs remains strong as the South African economy flags and unemployment spikes, emblematic of how hard it can be to fight for long-term goals if jobs are under threat.

By David Klein, Aditi Shakkarwar, and Stephanie Pincetl - DSA Los Angeles, March 30, 2022

By Kay Brown, Carly Wier, et. al. - Alaska Climate Alliance, March 21, 2022

Alaska has a vast endowment of renewable energy resources that can be tapped in its transition to a renewable energy future. Benefits of accelerating the energy transition in Alaska include more jobs, lower energy prices, higher energy security and the potential for renewable resources to support zero carbon hydrogen-based fuels for the aviation and maritime industries.

The state has already begun to develop its renewable energy resources and continues to support renewable technology development for Alaska’s challenging environment. The scale of Alaska’s vast undeveloped renewable energy resource endowment remains more than 14 times the total U.S. energy consumption.

Renewable energy technologies, including wind, solar, geothermal, and ocean and river hydrokinetic, along with complementary energy storage technologies, are continuing to exhibit declining costs which make them increasingly attractive as a primary energy source to substitute for fossil fuels in the electric sector and to support the electrification of buildings and the transformation of the transportation sector to electrification and renewable hydrogen-based fuels.

As local fossil fuel costs escalate across Alaska, from 2.5X higher in the Railbelt to as much as 4X higher in Rural Alaska (as compared to the U.S. average), renewable energy technologies are increasingly attractive investments and are poised to affordably replace legacy fossil fuel energy systems in the 2030-to-2050 time horizon while providing greater energy security, increased energy resiliency especially in rural Alaska, and broad environmental, economic and health benefits.

Independent studies have confirmed that the development of Alaska’s renewable energy potential will generate thousands of jobs – at least comparable in magnitude to the fossil fuel jobs that may be displaced by the transition to a clean renewable energy sector.

Read the report (PDF).

By Irene HongPing Shen, Sean Sweeney, Dominic Brown, Makgabo William Mabapa, Mbulaheni Enos Mbodi, and Brian Kamanzi - Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, February 25, 2022