30 Aug 2024
The clean energy sector added 142,000 jobs in 2023, accounting for more than half of new energy jobs and growing at a rate more than twice as large as that for the rest of the energy sector and the U.S. economy overall.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released the 2024 U.S. Energy and Employment Report (USEER), a study designed to track and understand employment trends across the energy sector. As the private sector continues to announce major investments in American-made energy, the 2024 USEER shows that the energy workforce overall added over 250,000 jobs in 2023; 56% of those were in clean energy.
For the first time, unionization rates in clean energy, at 12.4%, surpassed the average rate in the energy sector of 11%, driven by “rapid growth” in unionized construction and utility industries, DOE said. The sectors experiencing the most growth include zero-emission vehicles and renewable energy, as well as transmission, distribution, and storage.
“Our policies are working. We are now starting to see the job impacts of investments made through the infrastructure and inflation reduction laws – first in construction and as America builds more of these factories, we’ll see hundreds of thousands more,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The data clearly show that clean energy means jobs – good jobs, union jobs, and jobs retained – in communities across the country as we race to dominate the global clean energy economy.”
This year’s report reflects a record number of survey responses from 42,000 businesses nationwide.
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