Green Jobs from Industrial Energy Efficiency

摘要

Reducing unemployment is the most significant issue on the national agenda, and effortsto improve energy productivity in industry can protect jobs and create new employmentopportunities. While numerous studies have addressed the potential for green jobs throughstimulus spending or carbon cap and trade proposals, long-term policies for energy efficiency inindustry are uniquely able to save energy while stabilizing or increasing the industrial laborforce. This paper uses input-output modeling to look into how policies to promote processimprovements, incentivize plant utility upgrades, and deploy combined heat and power inindustry in the South could lead to higher levels of employment through 2030 in a region thataccounts for more than half of the nation’s industrial energy consumption.As policy-makers and concerned citizens from the southern United States evaluate thecosts and benefits of comprehensive climate and energy legislation, the current unemploymentsituation dominates the discourse. This paper will look into how policies to promote processimprovements, incentivize plant utility upgrades, and deploy combined heat and power (CHP) inindustry in the South Census Region could lead to higher levels of employment through 2030 ina region that accounts for more than half of nation’s industrial energy consumption. EnergyEfficiency in the South (Brown et al. 2010) presented a suite of nine energy efficiency policies inthe residential, commercial and industrial sectors, which could cost-effectively save 5.6quadrillion BTUs from the reference forecast and generate 520,000 jobs in 2030. Of the energysavings, 41 percent were from the three industrial policies. A breakdown by sector of themacroeconomic effects of these policies, using cost and benefit results from the National EnergyModeling System (NEMS) and IMpact analysis for PLANning (IMPLAN) multipliers in aninput-output analysis, will provide a comparison of the role of improved energy productivity inindustry relative to other sectors for green jobs potential. The refined input-output methodologyfor industry will assess which policies and states within the region may have the most beneficialemployment impacts over the next two decades.