In a recent Canary Media article, Eric Wesoff discusses Swinerton’s enormous investment in the solar market as it navigates President Biden’s pro-Union stance on green jobs.
Read an excerpt below and the whole story at Canary Media:
“When 130-year-old construction firm Swinerton shifted into the renewable energy business during the financial crisis of 2008, it was with the hope that it could temporarily reposition its workforce until it could "start building high-rises again,” according to George Hershman, president and first employee of Swinerton Renewable Energy.
Now, in a long-boom utility solar market, SRE has secured the ranking of the No. 1 solar engineering, procurement and construction outfit in the United States, according to IHS Markit (No. 2 according to Solar Power World). SRE installed about 1 gigawatt in 2019.
“We look at a solar project as somewhere between warfare logistics (with thousands of people and trucks driving into the middle of nowhere) and a manufacturing facility. Somewhere between there lies a utility-scale solar project," said Hershman.
"We're looking at projects in Missouri, Nebraska — areas that have traditionally been the solar wasteland." He added that Swinerton has built the largest solar projects currently operating in Minnesota, Wyoming and a number of other states.
“This is no longer just a Western market or a Southwest market,” he said. “Our biggest market will be in West Texas in the Permian Basin. And we are starting projects in Illinois [and] the upper Midwest. It’s a nationwide industry and job creator — and more than ever, rural.”
Utility-scale solar generation is clearly what drives the U.S. solar market.
Biden, unions and the prevailing wage
President Biden has lauded the employment potential of green jobs, but Biden could also be the most pro-union president in America's history. That creates the potential for conflict between unions and renewable energy constructors like Swinerton.
Politico reports: "Democrats are cranking out bills filled with carrots for developers of zero-emission infrastructure, but with pro-labor strings attached, including wage requirements, job certification and Buy American provisions."
Hershman, who also chairs the board of the Solar Energy Industries Association, responds: "Our concerns are the addition of requirements around certified apprenticeship programs. It's kind of a backhanded way to get a union requirement. That's not going to work in a lot of the country."
"We're going to end up bringing in a workforce to an area rather than hiring local. We've seen this happen before in areas where we can't hire local union people — you have to bring in union people.
"There's not a one-size-fits-all solution around union labor, because there are many different states and many different counties. We need to be sure that we are creating a supportive labor policy that needs to work in the Central Valley of California and...the Permian Basin. It needs to work in southern Illinois, and it needs to work in eastern Alabama.
"The policy structure that best fits that is prevailing wage," Hershman contends.
The 11th annual Solar Jobs Census, carried out by the The Solar Foundation, shows that the U.S. solar industry has a unionization rate of 10.3 percent, a figure that's in line with the economywide rate.
Hershman said, “We built our business in the 2008 downturn. Now we’re in the next economic downturn in an economy that needs well-paid, service-level jobs — utility-scale solar is that. We can train displaced oil and gas workers,” he said, adding that coal and fracking workers “have a home in solar.”