The employment potential of a Dutch offshore wind energy market

Abstract

Wind energy is currently one of the fastest growing markets in the world. In the Netherlands the potential for onshore wind energy is not large because of siting problems. Therefore the focus in the Netherlands has shifted from onshore to offshore wind energy because the wind climate offshore is substantially better than onshore. For the Dutch industry, offshore wind is therefore a promising, but still uncertain business. The Dutch central planning agency (CPB) has performed a social cost benefit analysis about offshore wind energy (CPB 2005). The results of this analysis were not very promising. Although it was not the main reason, this negative outcome partly resulted in the cancellation of the government aid on offshore wind energy. In the report, which the CPB wrote, the employment effect of offshore wind energy was not taken into account because it was not considered to be an advantage of an offshore wind energy market. In this thesis this way of reasoning is questioned. According to Greenpeace and the EWEA (2002), wind energy is the most labour intensive energy source which exists. The main goal of this thesis is to show whether the employment effect of a Dutch offshore wind market should be considered as an important argument in favour of wind energy. The central question of this thesis is: What is the potential for the Dutch economy of a growing offshore wind energy market to 6000 MW in 2030, concerning created employment in a Dutch offshore wind industry? To be able to answer this question a case study methodology in combination with a hybrid model of life cycle analysis and input-output analysis is used. The NSW and Q7 offshore wind projects have served as case studies. The results of these case studies were extrapolated to a capacity of 6000 MW in 2030 taking into account learning curves and labour productivity growth. There is not only employment created, but also lost due to a decreasing demand for conventional energy. By taking into account the current and future capacity credit for offshore wind energy, the lost employment has been calculated. The results of this thesis are shown in Figure 1. The results in this table are net employment effects, which mean that they are corrected for the lost employment in the conventional energy sector. For each MW of offshore wind energy capacity 15.6 fulltime additional labour years will be created of which 5 labour years will be created within the Netherlands. The division of generated employment between the Netherlands and other countries does not seem in favour of the Netherlands