The green economy is a hard-to-define term with a lot of optimism attached.

The economic activity surrounding the production of clean energy and improvements in energy efficiency — the green economy in a nutshell — is expected to provide a jump start to the economy sputtering to come out of recession, according its supporters, whose numbers include the Obama administration. A growing part of North Dakota’s energy economy falls into the green category, including wind power, clean coal technology and ethanol and other renewable energy.

But the question of counting green jobs is a tricky one.

As Michael Ziesch, a research analyst with Job Service North Dakota, puts it, “everyone and their dog” will want to claim that they are creating green jobs, as it is becoming a buzzword. It is a question that will occupy much of his time in the coming months. The North Dakota agency is one in six states that recently received a $4 million grant to define and quantify the impact of the green economy on the labor market.

It is not a simple question of counting heads.

Manitoba-based Sequoia Energy became one of the newest potential green employers here when it announced plans last week to build a 150-megawatt wind farm in Rolette County.

“It could easily employ 10 to 15 jobs over the life of the project,” said Sequoia Managing Director Bob Spensley. “That’s a fairly conservative number.”

However, the construction of the facility could employ up to 300 people who will be building roads, installing wiring, laying tower foundations and erecting the towers themselves.

“They all need to eat. They all need to live somewhere,” Spensley said. But is a construction contractor who spends one week building a wind farm and the next week on a nongreen project considered a green job?

Floyd Robb, Basin Electric Power Cooperative spokesman, said that Basin has eight full-time staff dedicated to wind power generation and five people working on renewable energy development and implementation. That number seems clear cut, but because “green” can be an elastic term, does it make sense to include the 700 workers at the coal gasification plant in the category of a green job?

What about workers at Basin’s Antelope Valley facility, a coal-fired power plant where Basin is implementing new technology to reduce carbon emissions?

“To define those as green jobs is a bit of a stretch,” Robb said.

Those are the types of questions that Ziesch expects to be looking at over the 18 months of the planned study.

“Wind power technology is going to be an occupation that’s green. Everyone agrees on that,” he said. “The wild card in wind energy is construction.” He expects that he will end up dealing in “shades of green” to account for jobs that fall into a gray area.

The Pew Charitable Trusts released a state-by-state study of the green economy last summer. Its estimate for North Dakota put the number of green jobs at 2,112 in 2007. Considering the proliferation of wind projects in the state over the past two years, it is likely that number has grown. Ziesch and others question Pew’s methodology and definitions. For one thing, the study excludes ethanol and other biofuel projects, as there is a controversy around the question of whether they produce a net energy savings — a question that Job Service will have deal with in its research.

Public Service Commissioner Tony Clark said that a ballpark estimate when it comes to wind power would be around 12 workers doing service and maintenance for a completed 200- to 300-megawatt wind farm. The state has just more than 1,200 megawatts of wind power scheduled to be on line by the end of the year. Once completed, “they’re not hugely labor-intensive,” he said.

Other states have been ahead of North Dakota in quantifying their green jobs. California, Oregon and Michigan put the number at 3 percent of total employment. Ziesch said that the number here could be a little above that “because we’ve got the energy component.” Mining and energy production accounts for 2 percent of the state’s employment now and 4 percent of wages, he said.

Part of the need to count green jobs is that there can be a political or commercial advantage to carrying the green label. An accurate study could cut through the hype generated by the term.

“If money’s attached to it, everyone’s going to want to be green,” Ziesch said. “It’s going to be there, so we have to quantify it.”

(Reach reporter Christopher Bjorke at 250-8261 or chris.bjorke@bismarcktribune.com.)