Employment benefits of electricity generation: A comparative assessment of lignite and natural gas power plants in Greece

This paper aims at developing an integrated approach for estimating the employment benefits associated with power-generation technologies. The proposed approach exploits the input–output methodology for estimating the direct, indirect and induced employment effects associated with the energy project in question, as well as two different valuation techniques, namely the “opportunity cost of labour” approach and the “public expenditures” approach, for expressing these effects in monetary terms. This framework has been implemented to estimate the employment benefits resulting from the development of a lignite-fired and a natural gas-fired power plant in Greece, taking into account all the stages of the corresponding fuel cycles that are undertaken domestically. The results of the analysis clearly show that lignite-fired electricity generation results in significant employment benefits amounting to 2.9–3.5 €/MWh in the basic scenario. On the other hand, the employment benefits associated with the examined natural gas unit were estimated at 0.4–0.6 €/MWh in the basic scenario. It is also worth mentioning that the significant environmental externalities of the lignite-fired electricity in Greece that have been presented in a number of studies can only be partially compensated by the estimated employment benefits.