Relatively Minor Retraining Investment Could Transition All Coal Workers To Solar Jobs Coal may be on its way out, thanks in part to the fracking and natural gas energy trends, and coal jobs are declining as well, due to increasing mechanization, but the imminent death knell of coal employment doesn’t have to be a complete job-apocalypse, as a recent study suggests. While it may be some years before we see the coal industry completely collapse, the decline in coal production and consumption is happening right now (as is the bankruptcy of the world’s largest coal company), so perhaps it’s time to consider how to transition coal industry employees into sustainable jobs. Joshua M. Pearce, of MTU, and Edward P. Louie, of OSU, put together a detailed study that looked at the estimated costs and benefits of retraining workers in the coal industry for employment in the booming solar PV industry, as well as the different methods that could be used to pay for this retraining. And the costs for retraining the majority of coal employees as solar workers, while still significant in everyday economic terms, aren’t nearly as large as one would think, with estimates ranging from a best-case scenario of $180 million to a worst-case scenario of $1.87 billion. See http://ift.tt/2b4LnWV
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