New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently published a column in which he stated that without “a carbon tax or gasoline tax or cap-and-trade system that makes renewable energies competitive with dirty fuels, while they achieve scale and move down the cost curve, green jobs will remain a hobby.”
Well, Mr. Friedman, I don’t call 94,241 jobs “a hobby.” That’s the number of clean jobs in New Jersey in 2010, according to a recent Brookings Institution study that ranked New Jersey eighth in the nation in clean job creation. Granted, the Brookings study defines clean jobs very broadly — garbage men count, for instance. Granted, New Jersey has strong state solar incentives that have propped up the fledgling industry. But guess what, our training wheels are coming off — and, although the ride might be wobbly for awhile — the solar industry is here to stay.
Here’s why: in case you hadn’t noticed (for instance, by looking out the window while traveling the New Jersey Turnpike), New Jersey has one of the nation’s largest concentrations of flat-roofed commercial buildings, which are ideal for the deployment of solar. Indeed, a state energy official has called New Jersey “the Saudi Arabia of commercial rooftops.” Since the potential for solar on the state’s commercial rooftops has barely been tapped and since it appears that exploitation is the manifest destiny of any energy resource, it seems highly unlikely that commercial rooftops — having been identified as an underutilized source of energy — will be relegated to the hobby closet along with the balsa wood and the macramé string. In fact, New Jersey just surpassed California as the nation’s top market for commercial solar. Moreover, unlike utility-scale solar farms located miles from population centers, rooftop solar produces power where it is needed, as well as when it is needed — i. e. during periods of peak demand. Yes, the solar market in New Jersey may have been spooked by the recent downturn in the value of SRECs (Solar Renewable Energy Certificates), New Jersey’s innovative system of solar energy incentives, but solar makes too much sense for the market not to be able to outride the market instability that is inherent to any new industry.
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