Students in the U.S. begin getting themselves ready for boom in green jobs

So says an article from ABC news here:

With President Barack Obama's pledge this week to renew the U.S. economy and jump-start the nation's clean energy future, it's a job outlook that's pretty bright.

Across the country, hundreds of thousands of students, those with jobs and those in search of good work, are now "greening" their skill set in hopes of competing for a host of environmentally friendly jobs, from electricians and metal workers to environmental scientists.

Some of the most promising money-makers are in the fields of wind power development and manufacturing, solar power, fuel cells (low polluters which generate electrical power quietly and efficiently) and, of course, biofuels.

This makes sense, as you can see on the following chart that even though the U.S. is in first place for total amount of wind power generated, it's still lagging behind in terms of power generated per capita so there's a lot of room to catch up with other countries like Germany and Denmark. The US for example has 55 times the population of Denmark, so if it were producing the same amount of wind power per capita in 2007 it would have produced 172,000 MW instead of 22,247, or almost eight times more.

Compared to Germany the U.S. has 3.8 times the population, so that would mean 91,000 MW in 2008.

This is one of the reasons why I'm still hopeful about the American economy in the near future, because it really does have the potential to move from a mostly non-renewable resource-based economy to one that doesn't depend so much on the fluctuations of overseas politics and resulting energy prices, and all it requires in the short term is simply adopting what a number of Western European countries have already done, as opposed to creating something completely new.

Installed windpower capacity (MW)
Rank	Nation	2005	2006	2007	2008
1	Germany	18,415	20,622	22,247	23,902
2	United States	9,149	11,603	16,818	25,170
3	Spain	10,028	11,615	15,145
4	India	4,430	6,270	8,000
5	China	1,260	2,604	6,050	13,242.2
6	Denmark (& Faeroe Islands)	3,136	3,140	3,129
7	Italy	1,718	2,123	2,726
8	France	757	1,567	2,454
9	United Kingdom	1,332	1,963	2,389
10	Portugal	1,022	1,716	2,150
11	Canada	683	1,459	1,856
12	Netherlands	1,219	1,560	1,747
13	Japan	1,061	1,394	1,538
14	Austria	819	965	982
15	Greece	573	746	871
16	Australia	708	817	824
17	Ireland	496	745	805
18	Sweden	510	572	788
19	Norway	267	314	333
20	New Zealand	169	171	322
21	Egypt	145	230	310
22	Belgium	167	193	287
23	Taiwan	104	188	282
24	Poland	83	153	276
25	Brazil	29	237	247
26	South Korea	98	173	191
27	Turkey	20	51	146
28	Czech Republic	28	50	116
29	Morocco	64	124	114
30	Finland	82	86	110	143
31	Ukraine	77	86	89
32	Mexico	3	88	87
33	Costa Rica	71	74	74
34	Bulgaria	6	36	70
35	Iran	23	48	66
36	Hungary	18	61	65
	Rest of Europe	129	163
	Rest of Americas	109	109
	Rest of Asia	38	38
	Rest of Africa & Middle East	31	31
	Rest of Oceania	12	12
	World total (MW)	59,091	74,223	93,849