Clean Energy Jobs Now Outnumber Fossil Fuel Ones

The number of jobs in the clean energy industry is rapidly growing at present. More than one-half of energy jobs today are clean energy jobs, as revealed by a new report.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) put forth the first World Energy Employment Report which discusses how hiring in the clean energy sector has managed to raise the employment rate above the numbers before Covid struck us, all over the world. Other energy industry jobs, such as those in the oil and gas sector, are still trying to recover the jobs they lost during the initial days of the pandemic.

According to the IEA, clean energy jobs have now surpassed the 50% mark for their contribution to the poll of energy employment. Not only that, but it also shows enormous potential for job creation around the world.

The war in Ukraine due to the Russian invasion has the entire world looking at options of launching their own homegrown clean energy industries, according to IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. We would be able to see a significant rise in job growth from the regions that make the move for clean energy projects.

By the year 2019, more than 65 million employees were employed in the energy industry. This was around 2% of the formal global employment. Between 2019 and 2021, 1.3 million energy jobs were added to the job market. According to the estimates by the IEA, almost all of these jobs are in the clean energy sector.

The major drivers of the job growth in clean energy are new manufacturing facilities in solar technologies and electric vehicles which have come online since 2019. IEA considers employees in the bioenergy supply, generating power from nuclear and renewable sources, electricity grids and storage, electric vehicle manufacturing, and energy efficiency sectors as clean energy workers.

Employment trends are being driven by the efforts taken to decarbonize the energy sector, as said by the IEA. Countries that represent about 70% of global emissions have committed to reaching targets on net-zero emissions which will contribute to removing greenhouse emissions, by the year 2050.

Clean energy will allow the world to use renewable energy sources to generate energy with no or low greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, more than 50% of the energy supply of most regions in the world is supplied by clean energy practices, except in the Middle East and Russia.

More than half of the world’s energy jobs are provided by the Asia-Pacific region. These countries have access to lower-cost labor which allows them to expand in the manufacturing of solar technologies, electric vehicles, and batteries.

The number of employees in solar photovoltaics systems work grew from 3 million to 3.4 million between 2019 and 2021. Almost half of these workers were employed in China. In North America, there were around 280,000 solar PV workers. In Europe, there were more than 260,000.