Madison College instructor Ken Walz (rear) helps oversee the installation of solar panels in a Costa Rican village in 2011 with students and volunteers. Trips like these help train students for work in renewable energy.
On a nine-day trip to Mastatal, Costa Rica, in the spring of 2011, a group of Madison College students got a glimpse of the future.
They found about 100 people in the remote farming village living in houses built by hand, with wood taken from the surrounding forest. The homes had dirt floors, tin roofs, no running water and no electricity. But the students helped the villagers get one modern convenience: electricity.
During the program, organized through the NGO Rancho Mastatal, students installed solar panels, some capable of powering a lightbulb or two, others as much as an electric guitar.
The solar systems might also save lives. Outdoor lighting helps the villagers see venomous snakes as they go to and from the latrine at night. “My favorite part of the Costa Rica trip was the eye-opening experience of how important just a little bit of light at night can be,” says Michael Reuter, one of the students who was on the trip.
“Here in the states we take lights for granted, flip a switch and let there be light! In the rural areas of Costa Rica, electric light after dark could mean many great things, like the ability to read and learn after the sun went down, cooking after dark, or simply safety, like not stepping on snakes or other harmful creatures unintentionally.”
But solar technology could be Wisconsin’s next big industry, providing both high-paying jobs and energy independence. Ken Walz, a chemistry and engineering instructor at Madison College who helped organize the trip, is seeing the demand for workers in this new field surge and the college is trying to meet the demand, by offering several training programs and trips like these to help train students.
They’re playing catch-up. “We have more people hiring than we have students in the pipeline,” Walz says.
Cris Folk, an instructor of electronics and industrial maintenance at Madison College, admits that there’s a lot of skepticism about green energy since Donald Trump, who pledged to restore the coal industry to prominence, became president.
“In spite of that, we are seeing record [solar] installation,” Folk says.
In fact, the green market — which includes solar, wind and bioenergy — is booming. The sector encompasses a wide swath of jobs, including manufacturing, installation, financing, sales, distribution and maintenance.
Nationally, solar and wind jobs have been growing by about 20 percent per year, according to a report by the Environmental Defense Fund and Meister Consultants Group. The report estimates that 4 million to 4.5 million people work in green energy jobs, including energy efficiency and renewable energy, as well as waste reduction, natural resources conservation and environmental education. This is up from 3.4 million in 2011.
Walz says that the growth reflects economics, not any sort of liberal agenda. “When I started teaching here about 15 years ago, the renewable energy sector was sort of driven by ethically motivated consumers,” he says. “But that’s totally changed. Those pioneers, by being the early adopters, help bring down the costs of the technology to the point now where wind and solar are cost competitive with fossil fuels. In fact in many cases, they are cheaper than fossil fuels.”
Wisconsin currently has almost 25,000 jobs in the green sector, according to a Clean Jobs Midwest report. The sector is expected to grow by 4.8 percent next year, adding 1,000 jobs. But the state has the smallest renewable energy workforce in the Midwest, according to an Urban Milwaukee article.
Nevertheless, opportunity is growing. The national solar company, Sunrun, opened a Wisconsin office in Waukesha in March with seven employees and plans to grow to 50. The company finances and installs solar panels on homes.
Madison College offers programs training people in installing and maintaining both wind energy and solar energy equipment. Reuter graduated from the college in 2014 and landed a job at Viroqua’s Ethos Green Power, which sells and installs solar systems. “While I was at MATC, I thought it might be possible to have a career in renewable energy, but it always seemed kind of far away,” he says. “It actually wasn’t until I sold my first system… that I realized this could actually be a long-term career.”
Reuter also appreciates that there appears to be a shared mission in the industry. “In general, almost everyone has the same goal — more renewable energy on the grid, and energy independence,” he says. “For me this translated to experienced installers, designers, electricians and developers willing to ‘take me under their wing’ and help teach me what some other industries might consider ‘trade secrets’ for the sake of the environment. Overall, it seems to me everyone does their best to help each other out while still operating a successful business.”
In 2006, Wisconsin passed the Renewable Portfolio Standard which set a goal of generating 10 percent of the state’s electricity from renewable energy by 2015. The state hit that target two years early. Wind accounted for almost half of the generation.
Since then, the state has not moved to increase its standard, which is now one of the lowest in the country. Iowa, for instance, generates more than a third of its power from windmills. California and New York have set ambitious targets of 50 percent renewable energy by 2030.
“[Wisconsin] was ambitious and innovative in 2005,” says Greg Nemet, an associate professor at UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Nelson Institute’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. “Wisconsin is one of the very lowest now.”
Joel Shoemaker, a photovoltaics instructor at Madison College, was involved for five years with the Wisconsin Distributed Resources Collaborative, a trade group for utilities that looks at the implications of green energy in the state. He says that members were at first wary of being able to make money.
While utilities are now considering distributed generation — the term for generating power from many decentralized sources, like solar panels, as opposed to a handful of power plants — they’re still leery about whether it will end up being profitable. “Utilities have that choice,” Shoemaker says. “Are they going to try to discourage distributed generation, or are they going to find some way of embracing it?”
Some utilities have taken steps to increase solar, although not as fast as some would like. Madison Gas and Electric started a Shared Solar project, allowing customers to buy into a 500 kilowatt solar installation in Middleton. The project allowed residents to support green energy without having to install panels on their home. The project quickly sold out of shares.
Nemet says that when governments encourage green technologies, they’re also creating jobs and markets that are “intrinsically local.”
“Renewables are a better bet for a lot of reasons, mainly because they are cleaner,” he says. “Two, there’s a lot more jobs attached to them that are less likely to be automated away. And then three, the renewables are just becoming so cheap now that it’s not really a sacrifice.”
