CREATING GREEN JOBS
There are two states in the US where you can’t find self-service filling stations: New Jersey and Oregon. I can’t speak for Oregon because I’ve never been there, but in New Jersey buying gas is a rare treat. Not only does a courteous person do the dirty work of filling your tank and scrubbing the windshield (often the rear window too!), gasoline in New Jersey is always considerably cheaper than gas in nearby states. Even with gas 20 cents a gallon less, the stations make money: low gas taxes make this possible.
If I’m headed towards the Garden State I wait to fill up there rather than here in Maryland.
The requirement in those states to employ gas jockeys goes back almost 60 years, long before self-serve gas was even thought of. Back then the reason for having an attendant pump gas was safety: You want someone experienced dealing with a highly flammable liquid.
Occasionally, state politicians get the bug to remove the regulation and allow self-serve gas in the states. New Jerseyans say no, we like having our gas pumped.
But there’s additional reason to keep the attendants: jobs. The labor unions want to keep people working, and in this economic climate they have a point. Working people with secure jobs spend money, put it back into the economy. Laid off people hoard cash: That’s bad for the economy, national and local.
The job of “gas station attendant” can’t be exported by the way.
Now possibly on the horizon could be a new way to energize our cars: on-the-fly replacement of battery packs. Better Place, which wants to build networks of electric car charging and battery swap facilities, has demonstrated its first battery swap station. The process, protected from the weather by a small enclosure, includes a completely mechanized process that takes less than a minute to remove and replace a heavy battery pack from the underside of an electric vehicle. In photos the system seems very slick and requires no human input. Unfortunately.
It looks as though a trained worker using a forklift and a little technology (such as a camera to look under the vehicle) and simple infrastructure (like a ramp to raise the vehicle a bit) could also replace the batteries with a much less expensive investment. And, like the job-creating no self-serve gas in Oregon and New Jersey, letting skilled humans remove and replace batteries creates jobs, green ones at that.
Since this is really a story about jobs, let’s jump from reenergizing cars to adding clean power to the grid that could create lots of jobs.
Recently as noted in the Green Energy News story, “Sunny Spots for Rent”, Duke Energy of North Carolina was in the early phases of building a hosted distributed solar energy power network. With no upfront cost, the company will install small solar systems on qualifying homes and businesses and pay the property owners monthly rent for the privilege of using their rooftop and grid connection.
Now APS (Arizona Public Service) is planning a very similar project with the real difference being that participants will receive a portion of their energy, determined by the size of the system hosted, from solar energy. They’ll still have to pay for electricity but the equivalent solar portion will be fixed for 20 years. (Power from the grid, like all energy, is expected to rise over time.)
The Duke and APS solar projects are ones that other utilities could look at and could be encouraged by Washington to expand countrywide. Not only would clean power be added to the grid and property owners have a new source of income or money saved, hosted distributed energy solar projects could be a national job creator. Aside from solar companies churning out more panels (both here and abroad), planning, installing, managing and maintaining all those solar systems would generate a new round of skilled jobs. Just what the economy needs.
by Bruce Mulliken, Green Energy News
Links:
The APS Community Power Project
http://www.aps.com/communitypower
North Carolina Solar Distributed Generation Program
http://www.duke-energy.com/solar-host
Green Energy News story “Sunny Spots for Rent”
http://www.green-energy-news.com/arch/nrgs2009/20090038.html
