The United States doesn’t lack the technology to head off climate catastrophe—it lacks enough trained workers to install it fast enough.
The Inflation Reduction Act, passed last summer, allocates $370 billion toward energy security and climate action. According to a recent analysis by the nonprofit Energy Futures Initiative, the legislation will create 1.5 million jobs by the year 2030. Over 100,000 will be in manufacturing, with 60,000 coming from battery production alone. Nearly 600,000 jobs would be added in the construction sector—building out electrical transmission lines, for instance, and the facilities to manufacture those batteries—while the electric utility sector would gain 190,000.
The solar industry could grow from 230,000 to 400,000 employees this decade and will have to exceed 900,000 by 2035 to reach the Biden administration’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Yet we don’t have enough electricians to electrify post-fossil-fuel energy systems, like photovoltaic panels and electric heat pumps—and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the demand for those electricians will grow 7 percent by 2031. The bureau just released a report finding that the number of job openings in construction jumped by 129,000 in February, although job openings in general decreased by 632,000. The number of people applying to construction jobs online has remained flat after falling 40 percent between 2019 and 2020.
So the jobs are there, but qualified workers to fill them are harder to find. “The green transition is going to generate upwards of 25 million new jobs [in the US] in the next 15 years—this is just going to be a tremendous transformation of the US workforce,” says Mark Paul, an environmental economist at Rutgers University. “You can’t outsource the installation of heat pumps or solar panels on somebody’s roof to China or Bangladesh.”
But, Paul adds, “do we have enough electricians, enough solar installers, enough wind installers, enough home retrofitters to transition immediately? Absolutely not.”