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Solar: America's Fastest Growing Job-Creation Engine?

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This guest post was written by Danny Kennedy, co-founder and president of Sungevity, an Oakland, Calif., solar company, and author of the book Rooftop Revolution.

By Danny Kennedy

Well this is embarrassing for Mitt Romney. Rather than being a failure, solar is a success, most importantly at creating jobs. So much for the conventional wisdom that post-Solyndra the solar industry can pretty much be written off. Au contraire, it is amongst the fastest – if not the fastest – growing sectors in the U.S. economy.

It always rang a little hollow that just because one company, namely Solyndra, or even five companies, failed the whole industry was a bust. I mean, if that were the case, post Netscape, Pets.com and Webvan we should have written off investments in the Internet industry. But of course since those crazy days, web-business has become known as a singular success story in the information age and U.S. economy. So too will solar.

And indeed it is coming to pass.  The Solar Foundation (I sit on the board of directors) has just released its annual Jobs Census. It shows, by a conservative methodology, that the solar industry has added 13,800 jobs so far this year from a base of about 105,000 employees. How many industries in America grew 13% in 2012?

These are mostly jobs downstream in the value chain – like installers and the companies providing the logistics and equipment for installers to do their job. There are also thousands being employed in the new financing business around the solar economy and the software and information technology services required to patch it into our aging power grid.

So Romney was wrong to belittle solar job creation efforts, like when he went to the Solyndra factory to try to make fun of his opponent but made fun of all of us working for clean energy now. How will he make up for it if he is elected president on Tuesday?

When you have massive unemployment, which is a structural reality of the legacy economy, any new industry that offers greater job density than its competition is likely to garner public support. And despite the many flaws of our democracy, what the public want is likely to be what the politicians try to foster.

Fossil fuels can claim they employ more people, which they do today, but the numbers are surprisingly small. Coal, for example, employs about 80,000 miners (although those numbers havedeclined rapidly in recent decades) and maybe as many people in ancillary industries like railroads and power plants. So call it 160,000.

The coal industry has been around for over a century and provides more than a third of our power supply but employs just some 1.5 times as many people as solar companies. The solar industry currently provides about 0.5% of our power supply and already employs 119,000 Americans. How many will we employ at 10% of power supply? How will Romney or President Obama work to grow this clear recipe for success? Shine on.