How To Keep Solar Workers Safe In Extreme Heat
Originally published by Union of Concerned Scientists, The Equation.
By Adenike Adeyeye
Climate change-induced heat waves have been brutal across the country this summer, and perhaps paradoxically, the workers who are helping us avoid the worst of climate change are particularly at risk in this heat. Clean energy workers who are installing solar panels work outdoors and face high risk of heat stress when temperatures climb. At the same time, many of these workers are not a part of any union and do not have bargaining power to make sure they receive the workplace protections they deserve by law. Let’s take a look at how greater workplace protections, like unionization, would help these workers stay safe in extreme heat.
Outdoor solar workers make up the majority of a growing industry
The solar industry is growing across the board, given solar energy is one of the key tools in our race to blunt the effects of climate change. In 2020, 231,474 people were employed in the solar industry, and just 10% of those workers were part of a union. (This is similar to the economy-wide union rate: in 2019, 10.3% of all workers were union members.) The industry is projected to employ 400,000 workers by 2030. The Biden administration has prioritized clean energy jobs to revitalize a sluggish economy while mitigating the effects of climate change, and the Solar Foundation has estimated that reaching the goals of the Biden Administration’s clean energy standard would require 900,000 solar workers by 2035.
To narrow our focus down to outdoor workers, let’s look at the stats for workers in installation or construction related jobs in the solar industry. They make up 67% of all workers in the industry, or an estimated 154,610 jobs in 2020, and 11.7% of them were members of a union. If the industry grows to 900,000 workers by 2035 as the Solar Foundation estimates, that means more than 600,000 people in the solar industry will be working outdoors. If the proportion of unionized workers stays the same, approximately 70,500 outdoor workers will be unionized and over 530,000 outdoor workers will not be unionized.
While this blog assumes that installation and construction jobs are outdoors, they are not the only jobs that might take place outside. Some solar marketing jobs require workers to go door to door to sell homeowners on installing rooftop solar. There were 25,663 sales and distribution workers in 2020, but it is unclear what proportion of those people worked outdoors. Those door-to-door workers would also benefit from heat safety protections. Similarly, outdoor workers in other clean energy industries would also benefit from stronger workplace protections.
What outdoor heat protections do solar workers need?
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, lists extreme heat as one of the green job hazards that solar workers experience. As summer weather gets more and more extreme in the West and across the country, employers need to provide outdoor workers with schedule changes, personal protective equipment, hydration, and breaks necessary to keep them healthy. And shockingly, there are no federal laws requiring employers to offer these protections to workers. OSHA recommends, but does not require, limiting sun exposure during the most intense periods for UV radiation — from 10 am to 4pm — as well as working in the shade, taking frequent short breaks, and staying hydrated by drinking water frequently. Public health and workplace safety officials also recommend employers to give workers time to adjust to rising temperatures. This process is called acclimatization and it allows workers to work shorter or less intense shifts while their bodies get used to the heat.
Following the OSHA guidelines could be easier said than done for some outdoor solar workers, depending on their employers. To comply with these guidelines, employers will need to allow their employees to take breaks often. They will need to shift the workday to minimize the amount of work happening at the hottest times of day. They may need additional labor while workers acclimatize — the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health states that new workers should have no more than 20% exposure to heat (relative to a normal workday) on their first day at work, and the exposure can increase no more than 20% per day after that.
Employers’ responsibilities to keep the work environment safe grow as the heat index rises. When the heat index ranges from 103 to 115 degrees, OSHA categorizes the risk level as high and calls for employers to provide water, encourage employees to drink water frequently, have medical personnel on site or available within 3-4 minutes, and actively enforce frequent breaks to prevent heat stress. When the heat index is above 115 degrees, the OSHA risk level rises to “very high to extreme” and employers are supposed to reschedule any nonessential work to a cooler day. These precautions are necessary to protect workers’ health but also come at a cost to the employer and are not federally mandated. Safeguards are needed to make sure employers comply with their duty to protect workers, particularly when temperatures rise. There is a bill before Congress now, the Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness and Prevention Act, that would require OSHA to adopt true, enforceable heat protection standards — passage of this bill would go a long way toward protecting outdoor workers.
Adequate protection for solar workers is no small matter: heat stress is a dangerous, even deadly, job hazard for outdoor workers. There are dozens of fatalities every year due to heat stress or heat stroke from working in extreme heat, according to OSHA. Construction workers, like those who work to install solar panels, account for a significant portion of heat-related fatalities, as the infographic below shows.
Unionization and prevailing wage standards create safer workplaces
One way to protect workers across the board is unionization. Unions advocate on behalf of workers to ensure safe workplaces as well as fair compensation and benefits. Almost 90% of solar workers, however, are not unionized, as described above. Making unionization more widespread would require new approaches, such as incentives for project developers or policy changes like the PRO Act which was passed in the US House of Representatives in March.
Increased unionization in the solar industry could improve the quality of solar industry jobs in a variety of ways. Unionizing provides workers with bargaining power. That often translates to more accountability for employers, which can lead to safer workplaces. Say, for example, it’s a blisteringly hot day and the heat index is 105 degrees. According to OSHA, the supervisor at a job site installing solar panels should be actively encouraging workers to take frequent breaks when the heat index is that high. But these breaks are only mandated by law in a handful of states. And people aren’t perfect: even in states where breaks are required, the supervisor on that day may not be telling workers to take frequent breaks. Who is more likely to speak up and ask for the break they are legally entitled to? A worker who has the protection of a union or a worker who feels as if they could be replaced or let go?
In addition to unionization, there are other policies that can be used to improve job quality and safety for outdoor clean energy workers. A UC Berkeley report found that smaller scale, residential solar projects offer lower wages and fewer paths for career advancement than large-scale solar projects. The difference between the smaller scale and larger scale projects is that the larger scale projects are often required to use project labor agreements (PLAs). State law can direct or require PLAs for large-scale clean energy projects. PLAs are negotiated to provide livable wages, benefits, and safer workspaces. Like PLAs, community workforce agreements (CWAs) can help ensure that workers receive high quality, safe jobs and that employers prioritize local hiring and hiring from disadvantaged communities. Workers benefit when large scale solar projects use PLAs and CWAs, and smaller scale projects that typically are not held to PLAs and CWAs might be able to produce higher quality jobs by adopting similar standards for livable wages and benefits.
Lastly, prevailing wage standards also help empower workers and create higher quality jobs. Prevailing wage “establishes a wage floor for each occupation that all contractors on a project must pay at or above — typically set to reflect the average or market average for a given type of work in a given area.” Prevailing wage standards may also “require contributions to workers’ benefits such as healthcare, paid time off, retirement funds, and apprenticeship training.” Research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center has found that prevailing wage has minimal impacts on project cost while offering significant benefits via improved worksite productivity. While higher pay and better benefits is not directly tied to workplace safety, research suggests that states with prevailing wage laws report fewer construction injuries than those without prevailing wage laws. PLAs, CWAs, and prevailing wage agreements have helped make jobs safer and more lucrative for workers.
The solar industry is a critical sector in transitioning our economy from its reliance on fossil fuels to clean energy. The industry should serve as a model in how it protects its workers, especially as its ranks continue to grow and our summers get hotter and hotter. Policies designed to give outdoor workers the job protections they deserve should become the norm, rather than the exception, in the solar industry.
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This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes the potential end of Rad Power Bikes, Tern’s new belt-drive Vektron, a semi-solid-state e-bike battery coming soon on a production e-bike, ALSO drops price on its entry-level model, a tilting flat-bed electric trike/truck, and more.
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For most of human history, currency was a direct claim on tangible, productive output. Before the abstraction of government fiat or cryptocurrency, value was stored in things that required real work and resources, bushels of grain, livestock, gold, assets with their own direct productive output: horses, and tragically, slaves.
These were the foundational assets of economies, representing a direct link between labor, resources, and stored value.
As we accelerate into an all-electric, all-digital age, this fundamental link is re-emerging, but with a new unit of account. The 21st-century economy, defined by automated industry, robotic, electric transport, and now power-hungry artificial intelligence, runs on a single, non-negotiable input: electricity. In this new paradigm, the real base currency, the ultimate representation of productive capacity, is the kilowatt-hour (kWh).
The kWh is the new economic base layer.
Last week, I was in Bijiashan Park at night overlooking Shenzhen, arguably the most technologically advanced city on earth, built over the previous few decades, partly on cheap electricity, cheap labor, and manufacturing innovations.
I could see the giant high-voltage power lines coming over Yinhu Mountain to power the constant light show that is Shenzhen at night. I couldn’t help but think about how cheap electricity and a strong grid have been critical to China’s exceptional economic rise.
As you stroll around the city, you see power everywhere. There are charging stations at every corner, including insane 1 MW charging posts, electric cars and trucks, trucks that carry batteries to electric scooter shops, which are also literally everywhere.
Everything moves on electric power. Industries are powered by electricity, and now, with the advent of AI, virtually everything is increasingly processed by LLMs, which are ultimately powered by electricity through power-hungry data centers.
In a world where everything runs on electricity, electricity itself becomes the currency of civilization.
It is measurable, divisible, storable, and universal – all qualities that a currency needs, but unlike fiat and crypto, it’s actually directly linked to productive output. No politics. No inflation. Just physics.
This concept is not merely academic; it appears to be the quiet, guiding principle in China. While others debate the merits of decentralized digital tokens, China is executing a multi-pronged strategy that treats electricity as the foundational strategic asset it has become.
First, China is building the “mint” for this new currency at an incredible, world-changing scale, and it has retained absolute state control over its distribution. Its deployment of new electricity generation, particularly from renewables, is staggering. The country met its 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of renewable capacity five years early, in 2025.
In 2024 alone, renewable energy accounted for a record 56% of the nation’s total installed capacity, with clean generation meeting 84% of all new demand.
Here’s a comparison of electricity generation between China and the US:
If this chart doesn’t scare the West. I don’t know what will. The trend is not reversing any time soon. In fact, it appears to be accelerating as China is doubling down on solar and nuclear.
State-owned monoliths manage this entire system, primarily the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), the world’s largest utility. For better or worse, this centralized control allows the state to execute massive national strategies impossible in a liberalized market, such as building an Ultra-High-Voltage (UHV) grid to transmit power from remote solar and wind farms in the west to the power-hungry industrial hubs on its coast.
Second, China wields its control over the grid as a precision tool of industrial policy. China’s average electricity rate of $0.084/kWh is cheaper than most of the rest of the world, but its power lies not in the base price but in its strategic application. The government deploys a “Differential Electricity Pricing” policy: a “stick” that penalizes low-tech, high-consumption industries with higher rates, and a “carrot” that provides preferential pricing to incentivize strategic sectors.
The most potent example is in the AI sector. China is now offering massive electricity subsidies, cutting power bills by up to half, for data centers run by giants like Alibaba and Tencent. The condition for this cheap power is that these companies must use locally-made, Chinese AI chips, such as those from Huawei.
China is spending its “electricity currency” to directly fund the growth of its domestic AI chip industry and sever its dependence on foreign technology. This same logic applies to its global dominance in green tech, where state-subsidized firms like BYD benefit from a state-controlled industrial ecosystem built on reliable, managed power.
Third, and possibly the most explicit exemplification of China viewing electricity as the base currency is its moves against cryptocurrency.
In 2021, the government banned all cryptocurrency transactions and mining. While the official reasons cited financial stability, the move might have had a deeper, strategic intention.
From the state’s perspective, it was a tool for capital flight, allowing wealth to bypass government controls. But in a world where electricity rules, cryptocurrencies are, in effect, a competing “currency” that burns the foundational asset (electricity) to create a decentralized store of value.
By banning crypto, China simultaneously reclaimed its monopoly on economic control and shut down a massive, “wasteful” leak of its most precious resource. It freed up that generating capacity to be strategically allocated to its preferred industries, like AI and manufacturing.
China’s actions, viewed together, are a clear and coherent strategy. By massively investing in and securing total state control over its domestic electricity supply (the “mint”), using its price as a tool to fuel strategic industries, and banning decentralized competitors that consume the same resource, China is making a clear bet. It has been recognized that in an age where all productivity is powered by the grid, the ultimate source of national power is not gold, fiat, or crypto, but the state-controlled kilowatt-hour.
The Blockchain and Crypto: Ledger vs. Furnace
This perspective brings a critical nuance to the role of blockchain technology. In an economy where electricity is the base currency, the blockchain makes perfect sense, but only as a ledger, not as a store of value.
A distributed ledger is the ideal technological layer to act as the accounting system for this new economy. It can track the generation, transmission, and consumption of every kilowatt-hour with perfect transparency. It can automate complex industrial contracts and manage the grid’s load balancing without a central intermediary. In this sense, blockchain is the “banking software” for the electricity standard.
However, “Proof of Work” cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin face a fatal contradiction within this paradigm. They aim to serve as a store of value by burning the base currency (electricity) to secure the network. If the kilowatt-hour is the 21st-century equivalent of gold, then Bitcoin mining is akin to melting down gold bars to print a paper receipt. It destroys the productive asset to create a derivative token.
Bitcoin is quickly losing credibility as a classical safe store of value. It trades like a security, at least over the last year, and its value is only whatever the next moron is willing to pay, with no valuable asset behind it.
China’s strategy reflects this precise understanding. While they ruthlessly banned Bitcoin mining (the “furnace” that wastes the asset), they have simultaneously championed the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) and the Digital Yuan. They have embraced the ledger to track and control their energy economy, while rejecting the supposed asset that destroys it.
This is a trap that crypto fans often fall into. They recognize the value of the blockchain, which is real, but they mistakenly broadly assign the same value to cryptocurrency, which is simply an application of the blockchain.
Electrek’s Take
What I’m trying to explore in this op-ed is the idea that if the present is electric and the future is even more electric, then it makes sense for electricity to be the foundation of the economy.
If electricity is the backbone of global trade and the metric of productivity, the kWh ultimately becomes the real currency of a truly electrified world.
And I think China has figured this out, as evidenced by its new electricity generation surpassing the rest of the world combined and by its ban on cryptocurrency.
They are going to let the rest of the world hold the crypto bag while they have more electricity generation than anyone to power their industries, which are already taking over the world.
I think the rest of the world should learn from this. Instead of pouring capital into meme coins and made-up stores of value, we should invest in electricity generation and storage.
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