W. S. Jevons (1865) on Coal (Memo to Obama, Part III) — MasterResource

Each renewable energy, Jevons explained, was either too scarce or too unreliable for the new industrial era. The energy savior was coal, a concentrated, plentiful, storable, and transportable source of energy that was England’s bounty for the world.

Wind Watch: Does wind power really provide more jobs than coal?

Earlier this week, Fortune’s eco-blog, Green Wombat, ran a story under the headline, “Wind jobs outstrip the coal industry.”

Blogger Todd Woody cites new report from the American Wind Energy Association that about 85,000 people are now employed by the wind power industry, up from 50,000 a year ago. Mr. Woody then says that “the coal industry employs about 81,000 workers,” citing a 2007 report from the Department of Energy.

Electric Power Monthly: January '09 - if we're paying enormous numbers of people to work on wind power, shouldn't it provide an enormous amount of usable electricity?

Coal-fired plants contributed 48.2 percent of the Nation’s electric power, year-to-date. Nuclear plants contributed 19.3 percent, while 21.6 percent was generated at natural gas-fired plants. Of the 1.1 percent generated by petroleum-fired plants, petroleum liquids represented 0.8 percent, with the remainder from petroleum coke. Conventional hydroelectric power provided 6.5 percent of the total, while other renewables (primarily biomass, but also geothermal, solar, and wind) and other miscellaneous energy sources generated the remaining 3.4 percent of electric power (Figure 2).