Job opportunities in renewable energy are pulling U.S. workers from the fossil fuel sector, but some worry that the available labour force will still fall short of the Biden administration’s clean energy goals.
“In more than a dozen interviews, energy workers and executives said they had switched to renewable energy because they felt that the oil and gas industry’s best days were behind it,” or because they were no longer willing to tolerate the sector’s boom and bust cycles, the New York Times reports. Many also said that “concerns about climate change, which is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, were a factor in their decision.”
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Employment in the wind industry grew 20% between 2016 and 2021—an addition of 113,000 workers during that span. But in the six years leading up to 2022, the oil and gas sector slashed jobs by 20%, with 700,000 workers lost to increased automation and a slowing of the shale drilling boom.
The Houston area alone lost 125,000 oil exploration, production, and pipeline jobs from 2014 to 2020—a 26% reduction, found a McKinsey & Company study. It warned that many more fossil energy jobs could be lost over the next three decades.
Oil and gas companies have continued to run tight budgets and hire cautiously in the past two years, after laying off roughly 160,000 workers in 2020 at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. But “many renewable energy businesses expanded rapidly after the early shock of the pandemic faded, snapping up geologists, engineers, and other workers from the likes of Exxon and Chevron.”
“COVID created a ton of opportunity,” said Jane Stricker, senior vice president for energy transition at the Greater Houston Partnership and a former executive at BP. “Nobody was making investments in oil and gas because returns were terrible. A lot of money out there was looking for a new opportunity.”
Still, oil and gas executives say their industry holds many more years of good employment, and some lawmakers and union officials have said the green transition could hurt workers because fossil jobs pay better and are more likely to be unionized. Data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests this might be accurate. The annual median wage for solar panel installers was around US$47,670 in 2021, while wind turbine technicians made $56,260. Petroleum pump system and refinery operators made $79,340 that year. That may not be a fair comparison by skill levels. But the rate of unionization in renewables also lags behind oil and gas, the Washington Post reports, though it is roughly at par with the low, 6% rate across the private sector.
Liz Shuler, president of the country’s largest labour federation, the AFL-CIO, said traditional energy sector jobs have allowed people to sustain their families for years, but this is not the case in the renewables sector.
“If this clean energy transition is going to go well, we have to ensure that those jobs are good jobs,” Shuler said. “So, we would say that there’s not a shortage of clean energy workers as much as there’s a shortage of good, highly paid jobs.”
But renewable energy executives say those comparisons are incomplete, since they fail to factor in the more stable employment their industry provides, reports the Times.
John Berger, chief executive of Sunnova Energy, said wages at his company had risen rapidly. “The pay rates we pay our service technicians are way, way up over the last 12 to 18 months,” Berger said. “So the pay gap, if there ever was one, has either closed or is closing.”
Many workers have also said the skills from their old oil and gas jobs have translated well to their new occupations. “The basics are the same,” said Miguel Febres, a petroleum engineer who worked in the oil industry for 19 years and is now a planner for wind and solar projects at Enel. “We install foundations, we install turbines, we build roads, we lay cables.”
But “with the U.S. unemployment rate at a historic low of 3.4%, many construction and manufacturing companies worry they won’t be able to hire enough clean energy workers to make batteries and build wind or solar farms,” the Post writes. The U.S. construction industry was short 413,000 workers as of December, while the manufacturing sector was short 764,000. The labour bureau estimates there will be about 80,000 job openings for electricians every year until 2031, as environmentalists push to electrify everything.
“There is definitely a labour shortage,” said Chynna Hampton, equity director for Climate Jobs Illinois. “It’s really hard to get out there and find those talented folks.”
The U.S. labour bureau could look to California for inspiration, say environmental and labour advocates. The state has new work force development programs for well-paying jobs in renewables and other sectors—especially for workers in low-income communities.
“With the Inflation Reduction Act and other laws, the federal government has invested trillions of dollars in a whole bunch of stuff,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance. “But a lot of this investment will flow into sectors where employers can’t actually find workers to make and build this stuff. And if we don’t address this, it will have serious economic and climate consequences.”
