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Friday’s Washington Post provides Op-Ed space to Sunil Sharan, whom they describe in this way:
The writer, a director of the Smart Grid Initiative at GE from 2008 to 2009, has worked in the clean-energy industry for a decade. The views expressed are his own.
Sharan titles his piece "The green jobs myth" and then goes on to warn us, in a tone that is ever so serious and with much hand-wringing, that "The facts challenge the prevailing thinking among some policymakers and officials that green jobs are a principal reason for transforming the economy."
What does he choose as his example of how the green jobs movement is going to eat jobs, rather than create them? He chooses that central piece of the green movement that we’ve all been talking about, the "smart meter". [Yeah, that was snark; I had never heard of smart meters before this column, had you?] Through magical math, Sharan then informs us that the installation of smart electric meters is going to cost us 28,000 meter reading jobs.
But how does he get there? After calculating that installation of the stated goal of 20 million smart meters over the next five years will create 1600 jobs for installing the meters, he then calculates the lost meter reader jobs. The central part of his calculation is here:
Now let’s consider job losses. It takes one worker today roughly 15 minutes to read a single meter. So in a day, a meter reader can scan about 30 meters, or about 700 meters a month. Meters are typically read once a month, making it the base period to calculate meter-reading jobs. Reading a million meters every month engages about 1,400 personnel. In five years, 20 million manually read meters are expected to disappear, taking with them some 28,000 meter-reading jobs.
Really? Fifteen minutes to read a single meter and a reader only reads 30 in a day? What planet does Mr. Sharan come from? Just a few seconds with teh Google found this as an alternative for the work load of a meter reader:
Suczynski is a NIPSCO meter reader.
/snip/
Suczynski spends five workdays a week crisscrossing front yards, backyards and side yards from Gary to Crown Point with a sense of proprietary right that even a sworn police officer would hesitate to exercise.
/snip/
This time of year, his trek to read 500 or so natural gas and electric meters per day is often through a foot or more of snow and in temperatures down to 0 degrees. That also means the meter is often shrouded in ice, fence gates are frozen shut, and dogs seem edgier than usual.
Hmmm. Sharan is off by just a bit. What happens to his numbers if a reader is responsible for 500 meters a day instead of 30? That would reduce the jobs lost by a factor of 500 divided by 30, or reduce his estimate of 28,000 jobs lost to 1680 jobs lost. When a realistic workload for meter readers is taken into the calculation, the jobs situation looks to be pretty close to break-even, 1600 created and 1680 lost.
Thanks for playing, Mr Sharan, and please try again some day when we could all use another laugh.
71 Comments
How many meters would a meter reader read if a meter reader could read meters?
Or is it:
How many meters would a meter reader read if GE didn’t skew the numbers?
There’s more jobs missed in the equation.
Every time there’s a change from one technology to the next — especially analog to digital — there’s an increase in technology jobs.
Not all of these can be outsourced, because the point of contact with the customer and the point where the data is aggregated must be serviced by a human. Although Mr. Sharan would like to imagine the smart meter concept works without hiccups, it doesn’t, and it’s already being used across the country so there’s data which proves the case.
Like my county, all converted years ago to smart meters read by a single reader who scans wirelessly from the street on a drive-by. Or other forms of smart meters, like the bait piles used for termite control — I know for a fact these create a mess of technology jobs back end even if the number of people in the field are fewer.
You know what’s even goofier about Sharan’s comments? It exposes GE management’s inability to realize a market for this technology. GE should already have a booming business designing, making and selling these smart meters along with a subsidiary which services them — but they obviously don’t if Sharan is deriding them as job killers.
Which makes one wonder what GE is really doing these days. Nice green-washing ads they have been playing during the Olympics, I might point out.
Oh, indeed. The green-washing ads are their primary focus right now, as far as I can tell.
And yes, you are right about the follow-on jobs, but I just wanted to concentrate on the folly of his 15 minutes to read one meter and how that affected his calculation. I also have a wireless drive-by reader now, too. The fact that this is how many smart meters are being read means that not even all the original readers are disappearing when the new meters go in.
I did make use of the email address at the bottom of the Op-Ed to ask if Sharan cared to respond to this post. No response so far, after about 45 minutes.
What GE was doing was turing itself into a bank right before the banking crisis. GE management is despite the Jack Welch hype is one of the reason’s nobody should invest in GE. A company I believe got some bank bailout money somehow.
Meter retem?
Jim, perhaps we do not know as many meter readers as Sunil Sharan?
I only know one, the electricity meter reader. And he only stops by every other month.
The gas meter is “read” on “radio” waves, how often or by whom, I’ve never observed, so their ranks, they must be thinning.
Besides, what happens when all these new green meters are installed?
What about demand, I mean its not like they are making people every day, ya know? Who can say what the night shift does?
Anyhow, maybe Mr. Sharan, knows meter readers, of whatever color, perhaps he seeks them out in his travels and during the day? He may well have personal relation, of some kind or another, with one or more meter readers
(wasn’t there a Beatles song … Lovely Rita … meter maid … or something?) just speckle elating, of course, being as wild speculation is all the rage, these daze.
Thank you, Jim, for bringing us many aspects of the absurd, from the Bureaus of Federal sleutians to the deep angst of Mr. Sunil Sharan and his GE-wizz perspeculations.
It’s all good.
Except when it’s superb!
;~DW
Fear not! It appears that Rita’s job is safe. From the lyrics, it looks as though the meters that she reads are parking meters. Writing parking tickets will never go away.
Thanks for reminding me of a great song.
Then, there shall always be jobs for meter readers, as long as parking remains a popular thing to do.
I’m told that there are people who do it every day.
They have statistics on these things, but now you’ve (or the hand-wringing Mr. Sharan) got me wondering. Are there enough statistic takers? We know that statistic MAKERS are to be found in profuse numbers, certainly equal to the number of statistics one imagines, but what about those who take it or them?
And what of those who make up statistics, out of thin air, Jim?
Or those who become statistics?
Mr. Sharan has opened a can of worms and I don’t even really know what he was fishing for.
No doubt the politicians will explain it all to us when they have finished health care reform?
DW
I work at a company which has smart meters and dumb meters. The jobs don’t so much disappear as change: you have more people who can understand and repair electronics and fewer who need to dodge dogs (a major problem for meter readers: you should see the comments about the dogs in the files). (Also, meter-reader tends to be a part-time and entry-level job.)
Also, fifteen minutes to read a meter is a very high estimate – I’d wonder if he’s ever actually been out with an meter reader. You might need that long if it’s in an odd location, but houses are pretty fast, and apartments and condos tend to have meters in groups.
And the right wing echo chamber is firing up to promote Sharan’s faulty math. I’m following links through Memeorandum (http://www.memeorandum.com/#a100226p76). So far, they have this blog entry at the Heritage Foundation repeating the distortion and they show that National Review online has linked it at The Corner (but I don’t see a post on it there, yet).
Oh man…when Heritage Foundation “stumps” for jobs, something is deeply disturbed.
Jim, I think you’ve only nicked the surface here. There’s something more going on with Sharan’s piece. Remember the problems with certain experts writing papers for think tanks, only to find they were being funded by a corporation? Cato Institute was one of them, just do a little digging into Doug Bandow, perfect example.
This piece by Sharan is a little more obvious since he’s a GE guy, but there’s more going on here. What’s he really trying to protect or promote?
A major part is that he’s trying to plant the meme that green jobs are a myth. Note that he titled his piece “The green jobs myth”. I noticed that even the Post wouldn’t go that far. Their link on the Opinions page is titled “The reality about green jobs”.
Something still doesn’t ring right, though. You see, GE could do a lot of new business in a smart grid environment combined with wind turbine technology.
And now there’s federal money up the wazoo to buy this stuff, too, as part of stimulus efforts.
So WTF is going on that one of their employees is actually talking down these opportunities which would benefit their own company??
Something is really wrong here, really reeks.
It might as simple as their huge role in the current setup of very large, centralized electricity generation and a fear of a decentralized grid where people are producing a lot of their own energy onsite (solar, wind, etc.) and even selling excess back to the grid.
Still doesn’t make sense. They could make money on selling both the systems and on the grid equipment and on financing both via GE Financing.
This.
Because of the current distribution method for commercial and residential electricity; the market is a natural monopoly. Decentralizing energy production/distribution fundamentally breaks that influence in the marketplace.
WTF. Are they just letting anybody on the op pages these days? NYT and WaPoo having a contest maybe? Who can find the guest writer with more conflicts of interest?
good g-d almighty, the washington post is going off the deep end, joining the “astrology causes global climate change crowd” regarding climate change. Honestly, the south dakota legislature passed a law calling for research into the link between astrology, and climate change.
I’m not kidding.
If the issue wasn’t so colossally serious these things would be comical.
Joe Rohm at Climateprogress.org has been doing an outstanding job of responding (repeatedly) to the hot gas they are producing on this subject.
And What does this tell you about their readership?
I can’t stand this s..t.
http://climateprogress.org/
one of the best sites on climate change.
Also:
What is absolute horse s**t also, re: cut the seal, pull off the cover, pullout old meter, pop in new meter, install cover, and reseal. Whats the second electrician for again? Plus if the meter reader was trained he could do it while making his rounds reading the meter.
Beyond any math failings, the article misses the point entirely.
How much energy is consumed by meter readers driving around visiting every meter once a month verses building and installing smart meters?
And what productive activity could the former meter readers be performing instead of the mindnumbing task of reading meters?
Maybe the former meter readers could be helping out with quality control and proof reading at the Washington Post.
Why not point out the ridiculousness of the contrapositive? We should purposely make the electrical grid significantly more complicated to maintain expressly for the fact that it will give something for people to do in servicing it.
It’s an argument against technological advancement and process improvement; literally advocating for deliberate inefficiency. By the logic of Sharan we should dispense with the plow, because it replaced field-hands.
I never cease to be amazed out how completely terrible people are at critical-thinking. What’s most comical about it is that he’s de facto advocating for the very worst cliché applied to Keynesianism; paying someone to repeatedly dig a hole and fill it again.
Um, we were looking at the contrapositive. Sharan was arguing against his employer’s business model, which is to sell improved technology from top to bottom of the entire grid, along with financing.
WRT the threat to a monopoly which wind energy may pose: it’s a weak argument, because every single residential installation and smaller corporate installation provides a sales opportunity to GE. A company which sold proven technology, installed and serviced it, financed it as well, under a brand name with household recognition, should be able to sell an unfathomable amount of materials and services. Imagine every household in the US which has a GE lightbulb or other GE equipment installed also being a potential sales opportunity…it boggles the mind.
Which is why Sharan’s piece makes no sense whatsoever — unless GE’s management has completely gone off the rails and is no longer competent.
I haven’t read such a ridiculous righty “argument” in, well, a few days at least. The plutocrats looking out for the lowly meter reader? Have I got a bridge to sell you.
Agh, Jim, I think I figured it out. Feel silly because I could have seen this coming.
This is a preemptive move against at least a couple of products which might change the energy market. You already heard about one this week — the Bloom Box. GE can’t ramp up fast enough to take advantage of the potential related to this product.
And the other product has not yet been commercialized, but it’s coming and it could be installed on every residential home without changes to or compliance hassles with building code.
Yeah, GE is panicking; that’s what this is all about.
Yes, it certainly does look like panic. A GE official even chimed in on the comment stream on Sharan’s article yesterday evening at the Post.
I really feel stupid. Disclosure up front: I own a small amount of stock in Dow Chemical. That’s why I feel stupid, because I know the product they are going to commercialize very soon is going to change the residential solar energy market.
I don’t want to promote this product as I know little about it, and I clearly have a vested interest in its success. But you can see how uptake by residential and some commercial buildings of this product would radically change the market for even wind turbine products like those GE makes.
Let’s assume there’s at least one other product like this one out there; it’d raise holy hell with GE’s current green energy business model.
GE is producing the Bloom Box?
No, GE is not involved in the Bloom Box.
The threat to GE is multiple:
– Wind turbine business required considerable capital investment upfront and orders require capital on goods with a moderately long lead time — the capital isn’t making money elsewhere in the meantime;
– The demand for changes to the grid for an exponential increase in energy suppliers may be beyond GE’s ability to respond as an equipment supplier, leaving unserved marketshare;
– Any other traditional energy production technology/services GE sells is going to be pressured by this exponential growth in alternative energy.
The Bloom Box has received VC funding from a number of sources; to the best of my knowledge, none of them is GE and most of them are big energy consumers with household names. I’m still on the fence as to how soon it will be before Bloom Box becomes a residential energy supply option, need to see sales volume in business sales first.
But the thin film solar film technologies are a real threat which is ramping up now. We could be looking at a perfect storm ahead where electrical energy costs collapse — then where will GE be?
For the record, I still have not received a response from Sharan to the email I sent him Friday just before noon asking if he cared to respond to this post. There also is no correction or update on the Op-Ed, so the faulty calculation has been allowed to stand by Sharan and the Post.
Not good at all, but unsurprising.
Went and dug through my notes; the technology which is likely giving them fits is the same as that in the roof shingles. A competitor, Siemens (NYSE:SI), which goes head-to-head with General Electric (NYSE:GE) on wind turbines and other energy-related products, is working on thin film polycrystalline solar panels using much of the same collection system as in the Dow’s (NYSE:DOW) shingles.
So now there’s two large capital global corporations and probably a couple more if I really went and dug around, all working on solar energy with residential and commercial applications. And Siemens can do it, end-to-end.
Pass the popcorn, this is going to be fun to watch — blood on the market floor.
I still also think that putting Sharan in place as the head of their smart grid initiative is something akin to the sorts of political appointments Reagan pioneered. It sure looks like they had someone running a program who held opposite views to the objective of the program (see, Watt, James, Interior Secretary). That tells me that very high level GE people didn’t believe in the smart grid. And now, as you suggest, they’re in a panic because they’re starting to realize what they are going to miss.
Rayne ~ I haven’t even done all my research, barely started, and I have no cash right now and I’m no housegeek but I know these shingles are coming and I am (surely not at all alone) out here just *waiting* for something simple to install that doesn’t break my cashflow for 10 years and doesn’t annoy my quasi-condo neighbours (I would like them to *not* notice) and gives me the potential to break the stranglehold of ever-rising energy rates (and perhaps earn some energy-generating income) and pay off my mortgage sooner!!!!!!!! So, I think, by jove, you’ve got it. They SHOULD be worried. It’s only a matter of time.
That was rattling around my head too … that GE got sucked into playing Big Bank for Bailouts rather than developing stuff that provides real value to real customers. A pox on ‘em.
Jim: don’t worry too much about the gaffe ~ you handled it beautifully and it demonstrated how weak the FBI’s work/documentation is. It would be good to see Van Jones coming back.
I had to LOL at this one. My meter is 1/8 miles away from the next nearest and the meter reader has to get out of the car and walk down into a swale where it is located in order to read it. Furthermore, it is still dials, not digital, so I doubt the accuracy of the reader. I’ve seen the reader only on a couple of three occassions, but each time I’ve wondered why Central Hudson does something soooo stupid when they could be reading it from a central location, electronically. Last I looked at my calender it is 2010.
What an awesome argument to defer progress. I am sure it took two to three hours to make a fine buggy whip. Just think of all those telegraph operator jobs eliminated by that ‘liberal’ Bell….
I’m thinking “WTF?”
Our meter is wireless – has been since about 2005 iirc. Most Excel Energy customers in Denver are wireless.
The meter truck just drives down the street, and that’s it, data recorded. And our bill went down too, because before that they used to estimate, which pissed people off.
His 15 minutes to read a meter could be right in a very rural area. Read meter, get in car, drive 10 minutes to next meter.
How many sparsely populated areas have monthly readings? I’d guess that it isn’t monthly, that usage is estimated monthly and readings are done bimonthly or quarterly in such locations.
Bloom fuel cells will require a natural gas, propane or hydrogen feedstock. Gas meters would still be needed.
Yes, rural meters would take longer, but there are just a lot more meters in urban areas. The overall average will not be hugely different from the urban average because there are just so many more urban people.
BTW Jim, kudos! You’re getting front paged quite frequently.
Thanks. This is the first time I’ve had two in one day. No chance of getting a big head, though, since I made a major gaffe on a post last week…
Au contraire, mon frere, you posted a CORRECTION, which was actually meaningful, rather than the sorry corrections others provide, buried in minutiae.
Correct… meaningful, and indicative of respect for accuracy.
Priceless.
The Guy is ex General Electric GE has to discredit green energy or else they have to explain to shareholders why they wasted decades and billions on new fission reactor tech when the U.S hasn’t made a new Reactor propsal since the 70′s.
That and India’s Thorium reactors are safer have longer plant lifespan’s and less waste. That and Green Jobs don’t have to worry there is no place to put radioactive waste.
GE shareholders should be asking for Jack Welch’s head.
GE does have a wind mill producing unit but rather than get behind that they keep insisting on a failed business model.
Nuclear Energy is a success the day it not the government can pay for all its own insurance in case of an accident.
You could move to Silicon Valley if you want to know what smart meters are, Jim. Here their primary use is to double or triple everybody’s energy costs. There is even an investigation underway.
Smart for the companies who use them, huh?
Obviously he’s just making shit up because, you know, WaPo doesn’t care about that as long as you’re arguing for the conservative side.
I’m still wrapping my head around this WaPo editorial. It just doesn’t work with my local experience here.
Excel customers here are happier with that wireless metering, as the bills went down. Up in Boulder, they’re putting up smart-meters which are linked to the internet, so you can see and remotely manage your usage.
This is ENERGY country! (Niobrara Plateau for coal, oil and natural gas.)
Denver used to be energy boom-bust cycle through the ’80s and now it’s a much more diversified economy, and no one is moaning about meter reading jobs.
I am just not reconciling this at all with the WaPo editorial.
Kelly! Don’t try to wrap your head around it flat, you’ll break something trying to contort that many ways.
Peg!
A thousand smooches upon you!
Wow! A thousand smooches? I’m flattered. Love ya back. :)
If the GOP has to lie to win then they know their arguments suck. The GOP lies all the time you would think they would reconsider their position.
Let’s calculate. Rs lie 100% of the time. Ds? 90%? 99%?
Let’s see:
If R’s are the baseline and the D’s don’t ever get outside the margin of error, it should follow that truth telling is statistically insignificant.
Smells right to me.
FTFY
Aloha Ya’ll…! I had a little excitement today…! ;-)
Do tell!
*heh* A little wake up call at 6am… Herded onto a tour bus and taken to a school gym for 8 hours…! Tho, I did escape for an hour to watch the ‘surges’ happen and then back to the gym for the bus ride back, a half hour to prep my gear for the mtn. top, and right now I’m at the base camp having just ate…!
I was thinking about you. I was glad to hear that the waves didn’t turn out as high as they could have been. Are folks calming down yet?
Hey CT, how are things in your neck of the island woods?
Have family in Hilo and south of Kailua Kona, am told they are okay but no details. What can you tell us about the experience?
Every gas station in Hilo had looong lines, Kailua town too, and all the stores were mad houses, but, everything is back to ‘normal’…! There were block parties on every street above Hilo… The whole nine yards, coolers, tents, etc…! ;-)
Heard you might be getting a righteous wave at Haleakala today…
dakine01′s diary is front-paged!
Saturday Art: A Songwriter
Unless you count all energy sector jobs as green jobs, these aren’t specifically green, they’re smart jobs. When has management argued against doing things smarter?
Had a smart meter installed on my house a little over a month ago. We had no choice, they just came and did it when nobody was home. Everybody got one. What is the difference? My hydro bill went up $10 month. We use very little hydro. Smart meter=tax increase without saying it.
Don’t think mankind is smart enough to produce “green energy” at all. Not sure where I read it, but read that it pollutes more to create solar panels, than the savings from using them. As for windtowers, another boondoggle. Set up a Corporation, have taxpayers pay for the building of them (which is happening all over the planet) then these corporations collect the profits for the limited time of existance of the windtower, which isn’t very many years. Retrofitting costs more than building, so then the windtowers will be sitting, all over the landscape and not being used. Mark my words.
Got references for those claims?
Not yet. Will try to find some for you PJ. As for the windtowers, I don’t need any references. I’ve participated in the construction of some and listened to the “bosses” explain how they’ll work. And not far from where I live is a nice field of them that don’t work anymore, and prob never will ever again because the corporation that owns them, won’t spend the money to retrofit them. They say it’s too expensive and not worth their money. They were built in the 80s
So marked – and I concur.
When was the WaPo bought out by the Washington Times?
Ah, here’s another reason for the smear job: Van Jones is coming back. If I have time, I may try to put that into perspective in another diary later today.
If you have not heard of smart meters, you have not even remotely been paying attention to the issues. Saying that there will be fewer meter readers after wide-scale deployment of smart meters cannot really be disputed. His broader point, that the shift to a more sustainable energy economy will involve some shifts employment areas or needed skills, can’t really be disputed, either.
What I think he misses is there will be many more jobs in development and maintenance of the more complicated energy network (which includes smart meters), which will have to be built out over the next few decades. And this says nothing of how many more renewable resources will need to be built and connected to provide anything close to the amount of fossil-fueled energy we have now…
WAPO is becoming more and more a right wing smut site!