It is obvious to all but the terminally deluded that there are far more jobs in wind and solar than in coal, oil, and gas. But facts are better than the obvious, so we'll have a look. Also, we have to use local wind and sunlight. We can't export energy demand to China or Arabia.
IRENA report, A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation
PV investment can create more than twice as many jobs per unit of electricity generated than coal or natural gas, or that women make up 10-15% more of the renewable energy labor force than are represented in the conventional energy sector.
Offshore Wind Industry Sucking Up Talent From Oil & Gas
File this one under D for Death by a thousand cuts. The US oil and gas industry is facing a workforce crisis in the next five years or so, and now here comes the red-hot US wind industry to add fuel to the fire. It seems that the offshore wind industry is beginning to steal talent from its fossil fuel cousins, as many offshore energy skills translate almost seamlessly from one resource to another.
That is especially true for offshore wind turbines, which use the same construction and anchoring techniques as offshore drilling platforms.
BTW That's Death by Many Thousand Cuts for coal, oil, and gas facilities, but otherwise, spot on.
Now, that isn't the whole story. We still have to deal with fossil fuel workers' pensions, for example, and cleanup of many toxic waste dumps and leaking gas wells. But we can discuss those on some other Renewable Day with a Y in it.
Production and Consumption
Coal
Since 2000, the world has doubled its coal-fired power capacity to around 2,000 gigawatts (GW) after explosive growth in China and India. A further 236GW is being built and 336GW is planned.
More recently, 227GW has closed due to a wave of retirements across the EU and US. Combined with a rapid slowdown in the number of new plants being built, this means the number of coal units operating around the world fell for the first time in 2018, Carbon Brief analysis suggests.
Another 186GW is already set to retire by 2030 and 14 of the world’s 78 coal-powered countries plan a total phaseout.
Meanwhile, electricity generated from coal has plateaued since 2014, so the expanding fleet is running fewer hours than ever. This erodes coal’s bottom line, as does competition from gas and renewables.
This map and article has been fully updated since it was originally published in 2018, using the latest data from the Global Energy Monitor (formerly CoalSwarm) Global Coal Plant Tracker. It features around 10,000 retired, operating and planned coal units, totalling close to 3,000 gigawatts (GW) across 95 countries.
Oil
There are about 700 oil refineries all over the world today, but - like oil - they are not equally distributed in all parts of the world.
Total capacity, 4500 MMt/Y. (MMt = million metric tons)
Natural Gas
Global Energy Statistical Yearbook 2019: Natural Gas Production
4000 BCM (billion cubic meters)
Wind
There are over 341,000 wind turbines on the planet: Here’s how much of a difference they’re actually making (2016)
The GWEC says that in 2016 wind power helped the planet avoid more than 637 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.
Looking forward, the GWEC says that in the European Union, 520,000 people are expected to be working in the wind industry by 2020.
Here's how much of the world would need to be covered in wind turbines to power the planet
Steve Sawyer the Global Wind Energy Council's Secretary General, did the math: 21,000 terawatt-hours (the average annual global electricity consumption) divided by 0.005256 terawatt-hours of annual wind energy production per wind turbine equals approximately 3,995,434 onshore turbines.
We aren't going to just wind. That would be nonsense. But we can say perhaps 2 million turbines. And more than 100,000 new ones annually.
Solar
How Many Solar Panels Would Be Needed to Power the World?
A total of 51.42 billion solar panels would be needed to power the entire world on solar energy. Here we are supposing a panel size of 350W for the calculated size of 18TW of solar plants.
Obviously, this too is nonsense. We have a terawatt or so of hydro, and the rest will be divided between wind and solar. But let's say, 20-25 billion panels. And let's say that we will need to install a billion or so every year in perpetuity.
Jobs
I could do a lot of arithmetic here and give you all sorts of job numbers, but why would I do that when the work has been done for us?
The Solutions Project: World
40-Year Jobs Created
Number of jobs where a person is employed for 40 consecutive years.
Construction jobs: 24,389,000
Operation jobs: 30,151,000
You can get breakdowns there by energy source, health effects, money, and more for every US state, nearly every country, and a number of major cities.