Green New Deal Plan - Renewable Energy System

Building Efficiency Program

We have available a report on building efficiency for New York City. The goal of this report is to understand how to make the buildings in New York City as efficient as possible, so that they need minimal inputs of energy to keep hot or cool.

Cost

The report projects a cost of approximately $167 billion over 37 years for New York City. If we kept to our 20 year plan, that would require about $8 billion per year for a City with close 10 million people. In order to project this cost over the entire country of 300 million people, we could multiply this figure by 30, or $240 billion per year. However, this figure includes geothermal heat pumps, which have been included separately in the Renewable Energy System. If this is one-third of the cost, then we need $160 billion per year. However, if at the same time the plan to create density was being implemented, to accommodate fully one quarter of the households of the country, then we would require "only" $120 billion per year.

Jobs

Page 7 of the report estimates that about 12,000 construction jobs will be required. That is a very small number for $5 billion per year spent (they have a 37 year timeline). Since, at $50,000 per job, one would expect 100,000 jobs, then the remaining approximately 90,000 jobs must be in manufacturing, transporting, and servicing the parts being placed into the buildings. However, we are subtracting about one third for heat pumps included in a different program, so we need 60,000 jobs, with 45,000 for service and 15,000 manufacturing, if we assume 25% in manufacturing. Then there would be about 8,000 construction jobs as well, for a grand total of 68,000 -- but then, we are compressing a 37 year plan into 20, so we would require about 100,000 total workers per year (compensating for some financial costs) -- for one thirtieth of the country. Thus about 3,000,000 workers per year would be needed for this effort. But now we need to subtract the quarter not needed because we are building new buildings, so we need about 2,250,000 people.