Jobs Jobs Jobs
I first published this in April — it is still relevant as the year ends…
Since 2015, 10.7% of all new jobs in the US of A came from five energy sectors. The amazing thing is that those five sectors only employ about 5.4% of Americans, or 8.24 million people.
In other words, energy does double duty when it comes to the most important immediate issue facing us: job creation.
Solar produces more jobs per dollar invested than dirty energy.
That’s right Mr Politician, Madame Speaker, Pndit, if you want to put America back to work, the best answer is to invest in energy. And clean energy at that. Because clean energy — by which I mean renewable generation, smart grid infrastructure, storage, advanced mobility, etc- is more job dense than dirty. Let’s take a look at those 5 sectors delivering twice their weight in jobs:
Fuels Production
46,000
Electric Power Generation
177,000
Energy Infrastructure
156,000
Energy Efficiency
400,000
Advanced Vehicles
134,000
These were the new jobs in energy from 2015 to the end of 2019, according to the 2020 U.S. Energy and Employment Report (USEER), released last week by the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) and the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO). It should be required reading for all stimulus advocates.
The point about Dirty vs Clean Energy is that many celebrate the boom in fracking for fuel production as a big job creating exercise over the last decade. But really it was small compared to new electric generation — mostly renewable during this period because of cost — and the best answer, our first fuel, energy efficiency (this is aside the bust coming to those fracking dependent communities). Even on energy infrastructure, some of the jobs came from capex heavy pipelines, but most from smart grid upgrades and the like.
As for making cars, not all those 134,000 jobs went to Tesla but 96,000 went into EVs, plug-ins and hybrids! And some tens of thousands went into the auto parts supply chain to contribute to fuel efficiency mandated by Obama and California. That’s not to mention the job-rich bicycle, bus and transit industry.
This all occurred at the back end of a good decade, which we know has fallen apart in the first quarter of 2020. Nonetheless, the formula is worth noting — while overall job growth in the economy rose at 6% p.a., energy employment grew at 12.4%. That’s a big delta worth diving in on in years to come.
Originally published at https://medium.com on April 2, 2020.
