Vanatta Max, Craig Michael T, Rathod Bhavesh, Florez Julian, Bromley-Dulfano Isaac, Smith Dylan
School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
iScience. 2022 Aug 10;25(8):104817. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104817. eCollection 2022 Aug 19.
To further a just energy transition, jobs lost at retiring coal plants could be replaced by jobs at wind and solar plants. No research quantifies the feasibility and costs of such an undertaking across the United States. Complicating such an undertaking are workers' place-based preferences that could prevent them from moving long distances, e.g. to high renewable resource regions. We formulate a bottom-up optimization model to quantify the technical feasibility and costs of replacing coal plant jobs with local versus distant jobs in the renewables sector. For the contiguous United States, we find replacing coal generation and employment with local wind and solar investments is feasible. Siting renewables local to instead of distant from retiring coal plants increases replacement costs by 5%-33% across sub-national regions and by $83 billion, or 24%, across the United States. These costs are modest relative to overall energy transition costs.
为推动公正的能源转型，退役煤电厂流失的工作岗位可由风能和太阳能电厂的工作岗位替代。在美国，尚无研究对这一举措的可行性和成本进行量化。使这一举措复杂化的是，工人基于工作地点的偏好可能会阻碍他们长途迁移，比如迁往可再生资源丰富的地区。我们构建了一个自下而上的优化模型，以量化在可再生能源领域用本地工作岗位替代煤电厂工作岗位以及用远程工作岗位替代煤电厂工作岗位的技术可行性和成本。对于美国本土，我们发现用本地风能和太阳能投资替代煤炭发电及就业岗位是可行的。在国家以下各级区域，将可再生能源设施选址在退役煤电厂附近而非远处，会使替代成本增加5% - 33%，在美国全国范围内会增加830亿美元，即24%。相对于总体能源转型成本而言，这些成本较为适度。
