The Public Benefit: Making Real the Promise of "Green Jobs"

Vince Kasten Sustainable Energy Specialist
Posted: September 22, 2010 11:25 AM

Renewable energy projects mobilize money, workers and materials to create resources for delivering abundant clean energy for many years. These projects are announced with great fanfare and often the public good will and political muscle needed to make them happen is predicated on the promise of local economic benefit and the creation of many local jobs. All too often the actual benefit realized is transient, and difficult to quantify; little attention is given to creating related programs to drive job and supply chain creation, and even less given to creating the monitoring and reporting needed to provide transparency of results. In the end, projects and their promoters take credit for job creation much like, as a congressional member once confided, "a crowing rooster tries to take credit for the sun coming up."

The amount of public attention generated by high profile, prestigious projects, as well as the effort that has and will go into making such projects a reality, demands greater, more far reaching and lasting results. There are however excellent examples of projects where economic development is an explicit goal of the project, balancing the economic performance of the project - so vital to attracting funding and advancing the cause of renewable and sustainable energy - with the economic benefit produced by the project. They capitalize on the effect that unique and compelling green projects have in galvanizing local and regional attention, and dedicate project resources and funding to programs that specifically target job creation and economic impact as requisite outcomes of the project rather than incidental side effects, making each of these projects a focal point for local and regional transformation.

The goals of these programs - executed collaboratively with established economic development organizations, community colleges, vocational/technical institutes and union programs - include:

· Creating jobs in target populations such as disadvantaged youth, displaced union workers, veterans and the chronically unemployed

· Creating a lasting transformation in the local/regional supply chain to support renewable energy and sustainable projects

· Enhancing the image and prestige of the locality that sponsors and hosts the project as leaders in economically viable sustainability technologies and practices

· Establishing research and development programs with local and regional universities

· Heightened awareness and appreciation of the citizens and the business community of the economic potential of renewable/sustainable technologies

· A lasting stream of funded projects - such as projects to retrofit existing buildings for energy efficiency - that may be unrelated to but inspired by Lake Erie Wind

In projects where we are directly involved the project sponsors the establishment of a non-profit "Institute" whose mission is to maximize the project's economic impact by creating awareness, training workers, and providing funded, technology-based energy efficiency programs to increase the sustainability of local and regional economies, directly create green jobs for the workers trained, and support the economic development goals presented in the list above. The non-profit structure also positions the Institute to mobilize public and private funds along with project-derived revenue to drive the creation of a new economy energized by the flow of talent and treasure into the project. Control of the programs, the Institute and the funding it raises and deploys is transitioned to local leadership, creating permanence in the organization and its programs.

By explicitly targeting local and regional economic benefit as a project outcome, these projects become a nexus for development of education and outreach programs, establishing leadership in sustainable technology education and job training, and shift the locus of economic impact beyond the considerable impact from its design, construction and operation into a job creation engine from with a lasting impact on the region far greater than that caused by the development of the project alone. They serve as a model for making real the promise of green jobs.