Wonder why people are talking about the number of jobs going away?

Here is the drop in labor as the number of workers needed to operate a power plant goes from 600 for nuclear and 125 for coal to 22 for nat gas, 15 for wind, and 5 for solar. One of the companies that is shutting down its coal plant and laying off 430 workers will be opening a solar plant in West Texas, which will be one of the largest solar facilities in the country and use two workers, who may actually be part-time. Put that in your future of work pipe and smoke it.

Coal fed 39% of US electricity production at utility-scale facilities in 2014, 33% in 2015, and 30.4% in 2016. Coal supplied 16.5 quadrillion BTUs of primary energy to electric power plants in 2013, which made up nearly 92% of coal's contribution to the energy supply.

There were 1308 coal-powered plants spread across 557 power plant sites in the US. Assume 125 workers per plant. That's 163,500 workers. Now cut that by at least 80% if the plants all shift to natural gas, which they will over time. That's a loss of 130,800 workers. And that's assuming that they all go to natural gas and don't go to wind or solar. This is going to happen in the next 10 to 15 years. My math could be off here or there, not by an order of magnitude.

It's just one more blow to the American workforce. And you wonder why I am so concerned about the fragmentation of the country?