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The successful arrival of solar’s gigawatt/terawatt future depends on a ever-more-challenging combination of cost cutting and technology enhancement, with a large portion of public policy behavior modification thrown in. But there’s another piece of the GW/TW scaling puzzle that sometimes gets left out of the conversation—the need for a large, well-trained workforce to do the thousands and thousands of jobs that will sprout up across the photovoltaic production and system value chain.

One solar pioneer who has not forgotten about the workforce issue is Dick Swanson, cofounder of SunPower, who included several labor-related data bites and observations during his presentation at the crystalline-silicon PV manufacturing conference held in conjunction with Intersolar North America.

Swanson laid out the daunting challenges facing the solar PV industry as it faces the very real possibility of growing exponentially in the neighborhood of 100x over the next 20 years, pushing up toward shipment levels of 600GW+ per year. As he noted, such C-level growth actually represents a relatively modest compound annual growth rate of about 26% between 2010 and 2030, somewhat less than the torrid rates seen in recent years (the current sucky year being the exception).

It's all well and good to have such dramatic increases in production capacity/capability, but it will do no good unless the costs come down—way down. As Swanson said, there has to be a 50% cut in module costs per decade to make this work, going from about $3/W now to $1.50/W ten years on, and then again from $1.50 to 75 cents/W by 2030. To accomplish this, capital expenditures must be slashed dramatically.

Some like First Solar would say that Swanson’s estimates do not go far enough, but whatever the cost-reduction metric, reaching such goals will still require a full-court press from an industry that doesn’t always know how to or doesn’t choose to play nice together.

This massive scaling increase requires prodigious growth and aggressive cost cutting in every parsec of the PV value chain, and across all the various, nonstandardized PV technology pathways. Everything from the development of new technologies and more efficient manufacturing and improvements at the systems level, to less-discussed areas like logistics (another multibillion-dollar cost point) and the labor force, to the need for increased and improved transmission-line capacity, and of course the policy, permitting, and other political issues that could slow down the exponential express must be factored in, according to Swanson.

On the labor front, the SunPower exec wove the “how many people it takes to make a gigawatt per year” metric throughout the second half of this talk. As he explained, 100x in GW shipment growth does not equate with 100x growth in the number of people working in solar factories or installing PV systems in the field. His self-described “half and half again” reduction in costs over the next two decades should lessen the 20-years-hence size of the solar workforce.

Swanson cited several areas—ingot, wafer, and cell-making—where increased automation could reduce the headcount per gigawatt. The three most labor-intensive segments are the more downstream links in the chain—cell-making, module-making (what Swanson charmingly refers to as “lamination”), and the (balance of) systems side. 

He makes no claims to scientific exactitude with his headcount-per-gigawatt estimates. In a follow-up email, he cautioned that “these numbers should be thought of as very rough suggestive numbers to get an idea of the magnitude of the labor requirements, not a detailed calculation for any specific factory or case.”

Nonetheless, they do offer a panoramic snapshot of the scope of the labor portion of the sustainability challenge. The table below details Swanson’s back-of-envelopes for the various value-chain segments, with the requirements per gigawatt, per 500GW/yr, and for 500GW/yr after factoring in what he calls “learning” (which represents better efficiencies, simpler processes, pervasive automation, factory-ready rapid-installation systems, and other economies-of-scale benefits).

As it stands now, somewhere between 8000 and 16,000 workers are required to manufacture and install a gigawatt of PV—at least for the crystalline-silicon side of the business.

The thin-film PV crowd has a different set of figures on the backs of their envelopes (and who’s keeping track of all this stationery?). I shared Swanson's guesstimates with a well-placed contact-who-must-remain-anonymous in the TFPV space, who offered some comments on the subject.

The thin filmer thought that the "75% learning rate" used by Swanson "would be impressive, especially for the silicon value chain that has been honing its process for >20 years already."

The source went on to note that "this model appears to focus just on the PV portion of the manufacturing." Other models might be "all-inclusive," factoring in the "labor to make the glass, to forge the BOS steel, assemble the inverters, etc."

If one plumbs First Solar's public info, for example, a run of the numbers shows that the CdTe company has about 4000 employees (or as the Firsters would say, "associates") and about 1.1GW of production capacity, which comes to less than 4000 workers per GW, quite a bit less than the figures shown by Swanson.

The TFPV contact obviously didn't know exactly how Swanson came up with his numbers but noted that "a manual company like Suntech will use more heads than an integrated company like Yingli. I’m guessing that business models centralized around Solarworld and Q-Cells fall somewhere between."

On the integrator front, Swanson recounted SunPower’s accelerated ability to deploy systems at a clip well up the GW-scale—or at least mondo-megawatt-scale—learning curve. He said the company’s team in Spain installed about 180 MW of utility-scale PV there last year, proving their ability to install 1-2MW/day in the field. Much of that improved velocity has to do with the company’s development of factory-manufactured, integrated systems optimized for rapid deployment.

If we run those numbers on a per-annum basis, one team of a few hundred trained installers has the chops to put up more than 700MW of ground-mounted PV in a year (realistically, the numbers wouldn't add up the same for rooftop installations). Multiply that out to at least several teams per firm and then to scores of enterprises, and the notion of dozens if not hundreds of gigawatts of PV getting installed worldwide on an annual basis becomes credible—with the usual caveats of financing, smart and enhanced production, proper policy, solid training, and the like.

A straight extrapolation to 500GW per annum would mean a workforce increase into the millions, in just 20 years. Although the recruitment and training implications of such explosive growth boggle the noggin, Swanson factors in a sizeable discounting in his estimates, seeing more like a million or so employed in the solar sector—a not-insubstantial global headcount.

However, as he pointed out, when compared to the 250,000 or so employed at General Motors (before its comeuppance, anyway), the number seems almost reasonable. And even 4 million workers isn't all that much, if we follow the money likely to be on the table—at a $2/W investment level, that's a trillion dollars per terawatt—if/when giga-scaling becomes de rigeur.

“I think the labor force training issue is important,” Swanson told the audience, “but by no means [is it] going to be the gating aspect as we go forward.”

First Solar’s Bruce Sohn said during our conversation in late April that the industry needs to be “thinking about what’s the 5GW company, what’s the 10GW company, and what limits us from getting to 2 and 5 and 10? It quickly gets to the point where it’s not necessarily the technology, it’s not necessarily the supply chain, it’s the things related to the development of the projects, the governmental policies. Those are the kinds of things that may significantly limit the industry’s ability to scale to those levels where we can solve those world problems.”

Although Sohn didn’t mention the labor issue, First and the other leading companies definitely see the importance of having a well-trained, plentiful solar PV workforce across all links of the value chain.
Even in the most automated assembly line, someone has to be in the control room to make sure the robots aren’t flopping panels when they should be flipping them. And we’re a long way off from trusting a robot to do an installer’s job.