The employment argument to win the battle for public opinion. This is one of the cards, all in all quite classic, that Yannick Jadot played on Wednesday evening during the debate between him and Sandrine Rousseau, his opponent for the second round of the environmentalist primary, which aims to appoint an environmental candidate to the 2022 presidential election.
Defending renewable energies, the MEP advanced on LCI that “for equal production, renewable energies are three times more jobs than nuclear”. A statement close to the words of Benoît Hamon (ex-Génération. S), who
launched four years ago that renewable energies represented six times more jobs than nuclear power, for equal production.
FAKE OFF
To support his statement, Yannick Jadot relied on an OECD report dated 2011, details his entourage at 20 minutes, which also refers to a 2020 study, produced in the United Kingdom.
This OECD report resumes a study published in 2010 in the United States, which establishes that to produce 1 GWh of energy, 14 jobs are needed in nuclear power compared to 87 in solar photovoltaic, ie a ratio of one to six. With wind power, however, the difference is much smaller: American researchers have calculated that it takes 17 jobs in wind power to produce this amount of energy.
Renewable advantage for British researchers
British researchers have them modeled that “a permanent increase of 1 GWh in the annual electricity supply generated by renewable energies creates 4.7 new short-term jobs and 3.5 long-term jobs”. They conclude that “3/4 of the jobs created by the deployment of renewable technologies are sustainable in the long term”. For nuclear, “an increase of 1 GWh creates 0.8 jobs in the short term, six times less than those created by a similar increase in renewable electricity – while in the long term, jobs
stabilizes at 0.5 jobs, which indicates that 2/3 of the jobs created are sustainable in the long term ”. Advantage, here, to renewable.
The researchers warn, however, that these projections are not applicable as they stand to all other countries. What then of France? There does not appear to be a similar study. The comparison exercise is made difficult by several parameters such as the difficulty of listing the workforce in a sector, illustrated for example by the different nuclear energy counts, or the fact that some of the jobs may be located in the nuclear industry. foreigner…
In a report submitted to the government in 2019, Laurence Parisot noted that “it is important to distinguish the construction phases from the operating and maintenance phases in order to calculate the labor input of the different energies”.
It is the installation of photovoltaic solar energy that mobilizes more labor, she noted, ahead of the construction of an EPR (so-called third generation nuclear reactor), 220 full-time equivalents against 200. “L ‘intermittence of renewable energies’, noted by Laurence Parisot and often pointed out as a limit of these energies, works in favor of employment: more full-time equivalents are needed to produce 1GW of electricity with onshore wind power and photovoltaic than with nuclear.
Laurence Parisot qualifies these figures by noting “the erratic growth of jobs in solar photovoltaic”, due to “the sharp drop in the feed-in tariff from 2011”. Due to the maintenance required by the fleet of reactors, it is nuclear that concentrates the most jobs, even if the workforce could also drop, she notes, if new plant closures were to come. to be decided. The battle for numbers is not over.