LATEST NEW ENERGY JOB TRENDS – JOBS! (AND WHERE THEY ARE)

Clean Tech Job Trends 2009
October 2009 (Clean Edge)

SUMMARY
New Energy authority Clean Edge, Inc., which has tracked New Energy finance and market trends since 2000 and claims to be the first company in the world to have been dedicated exclusively to doing so, is out with a new report and a new angle, the New Energy employment market.

With Clean Tech Job Trends 2009, Clean Edge breaks new ground with good news and delivers valuable details about who's hiring and where the jobs are.

In this decade, New Energy has moved up to take a place with biotech, software, and medical devices as one of the biggest recipients of venture capital (VC) and private equity dollars in the world ($3.35 billion in U.S. VC investment and $13.5 billion in VC and private equity money worldwide in 2008). With the influx of money, comes jobs. As jobs proliferate, trends become clear.

The numbers for 2009 are down but the trends are unchanged. Smart grid networking, high efficiency window and green building materials manufacturing, and thin-film solar photovoltaic manufacturing are seeing increased investment and job opportunity. Even media work in New Energy is growing.

The Clean Edge report chronicles the story.

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COMMENTARY
The report begins with the definition of “clean-energy job” used in the June 2009 Pew Charitable Trusts report on New Energy job growth over the last decade: “…jobs in renewable energy, energy efficiency, environmentally friendly production, conservation and pollution mitigation, plus related training and support…” (See THE NEW ENERGY ECONOMY MEANS BUSINESS)

The Clean Edge definition is similar: “…those that are a direct result of the development, production, and/or deployment of technologies that harness renewable materials and energy sources; reduce the use of natural resources by using them more efficiently and productively; and cut or eliminate pollution and toxic wastes.”

To be specific, Clean Edge listed examples of the kinds of jobs it looked at in its study: (1) solar photovoltaic (PV) system installers, (2) wind-turbine technicians, (3) energy-efficiency software developers, (4) green building designers, and (4) clean-energy marketers.

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Pew said such jobs accounted for 0.5% of all U.S. employment in 2007, some 770,000 jobs.

For perspective, there are 200,000 jobs in biotech and 989,000 jobs in telecommunications, industries considered established and mature. There are only 1.3 million jobs in utilities, coal mining and oil and gas extraction.

And New Energy jobs grew at 9.1% from 1998 to 2007, while all U.S. jobs grew at 3.7% in that time period.

Worldwide, the solar photovoltaic industry alone supplies 200,000 direct and indirect jobs and the wind industry provides 400,000 jobs.

Based on a combination of job placements, job postings, and public and private investments, Clean Edge determined that the top 5 New Energy sectors in which job growth is taking place are (1) solar, (2) biofuels and biomaterials, (3)conservation and efficiency, (4) smart grid, and (5) wind.

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Across the spectrum of first-time job seekers, mid-career changers, and all other job hunters, the top 15 metro areas, based on current and historical job postings, early stage and public market investment activity, clean-tech job presence, and clean-energy patent activity, include the obvious (San Francisco and Boston) and the less obvious (Chicago and Houston).

And there are plenty of other places besides the top 15 metro areas because, unlike the IT revolution of the 1990s that was localized in Silicon Valley and a few other high tech corridors, the emerging New Energy economy is a “highly dispersed phenomenon” and centers are springing up in clusters all across the country and around the world where there is local technology development supported by capital flows and smart public policies.

Worldwide, the pure New Energy companies (solar, wind, water filtration, and energy intelligence) are leading the way. 4 of the top 10 companies are in the U.S., but 3 are in China, and 3 are in the EU.

Diversified multinational corporations are also rapidly growing New Energy jobs. Siemens has 5,500 employees in its wind business, BP has 2,200+ solar employees, and GE Energy employs 40,000 people in New and Old Energies. Sharp, Toyota, and ABB are other big multinational New Energy players and the big utilities are growing their New Energy workforces as the momentum of the New Energy economy forces them to adjust to the brave new emissions-free world coming at them.

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Perhaps the most important focus of the job trends study is on manufacturing, where a national transition from Rust Belt to Green Belt is offering new hope to workers left out in the cold by shuttered manufacturing facilities.

Caught in the nexus of offshoring, economic downturn and emerging technologies, layed off industrial workers are seeing old plants retrofitted for New Energy purposes and coming back to plant operators in need of skilled laborers that need only minimal retraining to operate in retooled factories.

Specific examples include (1) wind-turbine production line workers in central Pennsylvania, (2) ethanol distillers in São Paulo, Brazil, (3) smart-grid software designers in northern California, and (4) PV manufacturers in China’s Jiangsu province.

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The 2008-09 economic downturn interrupted the upward trend but there is much hope returning already as the stimulus monies are dispersed. New momentum is gathering and the likelihood is that when all is said and done the crisis, though painful, will have accelerated the transition.

The heart of the Clean Edge report is its last 2 sections, one listing important trends to watch and the other listing cutting edge financing concepts.

The “5 Trends to Watch” summarized in the job trends report are:

(1) Energy Efficiency – The Most Bang For Your Buck. There is simply no better bet. There is no better place to get energy savings, which means money savings. Money spent on building retrofits creates 8 times the jobs of the money spent on coal and money spent on the Smart Grid creates 5 times the jobs of the money spent on coal.

(2) Aging Workforce, New Clean Technologies Transform Utility Industry Landscape. The center of the New Energy world is the utility industry and the multiple imperatives of peaking resources, climate change and energy security are forcing utilities to transition to the New Energy economy. They simply cannot get enough workers trained in the necessary technologies and so are implementing the transition from within. The utilities will continue to do so.

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(3) Coming to a Campus Near You – Cleantech Career Training. For the same reasons that the utilities are retraining their aging workforce, educational institutions from trade schools to Ivy League graduate schools are instituting curricula for tomorrow’s New Energy workforce. The economy demands a transition, the federal government is funding it through stimulus monies and the next generation wants to be part of it.

(4) Clean-Tech Manufacturing Moves Near End-Use Markets. New Energy is a “dispersed phenomenon” because energy is needed everywhere and environmental protections are needed everywhere and energy efficiency can be improved everywhere. Furthermore, it often makes more dollars and sense to build manufacturing facilities where the installations are needed than to ship the equipment. There are no physical pipes to carry wind turbine blades and towers or solar panels. Either they are transported in huge quantities at great expense, effort and some loss, or built locally. The latter choice turns out to be more economic.

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(5) The Next Big Thing In IT Jobs: Networking The Grid. Everything about the Smart Grid is Information Technology, from the Smart Meters and Smart Appliance attachments at the consumer end of the transmission system to the switching stations throughout the system and the ultra-sophisticated system controls at the hubs of transmission. There is now and will continue to be a need for interoperability standardization of all the parts and pieces, and programming to make the system ever more effective and efficient. This is, in a way, the inevitable next stage of the IT revolution: It built itself to have an enormous appetite for energy so it now must manage the delivery of the energy.

Five Emerging U.S. Public Finance Models: Powering Clean-Tech Economic Growth and Job Creation, by Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder of Clean Edge, Inc. and Green America, is a companion report to this job trends report. It elaborates on the “5 U.S. Models For Publicly Financing Clean-Tech Job Creation” summarized in the job trends report, which are:

(1) Clean Energy Deployment Administration (The Green Bank). This is an elaboration on the stimulus package, a source of funding designated by Congress to be specifically for New Energy development in the same way that the federal government saw to it that there was funding for the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and the Internet.

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(2) Clean Energy Victory Bonds. This is based on the Victory Bonds that financed the World Wars. It gives the public a chance to buy in and a chance to earn interest for betting on New Energy. It also establishes the clear perspective that the mastery of New Energy is as essential to national security as any other challenge the nation has ever faced.

(3) Tax Credit Bonds. This is a bond directed at bigger financial players because it offers tax credits instead of interest on bond investments.

(4) Federal Loan Guarantees. This simply extends to New Energy what Old Energies have been growing fat on for a long time. Putting the weight of the federal government’s assurance behind the financing of new projects will surely attract the financing developers need to build a New Energy and Energy Efficiency infrastructure and a new, smart, high-capacity grid.

(5) City Funds. This is a pioneering concept that goes municipal bonds one better by allowing city funds to pay upfront costs for distributed generation New Energy installations and Energy Efficiency retrofits and collect payments through local property taxes. Relieved of the burden of upfront costs, homeowners in isolated cities have already demonstrated a higher degree of willingness to commit themselves to New Energy and efficiency retrofits.

The Clean Edge report concludes with a resource guide for employers and job hunters that catalogues books, reports, web sites, jobs boards, job fairs, networking organizations and educational programs.

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QUOTES
- From the report: “Admittedly, we aren’t alone in being interested in the topic of clean-tech jobs…U.S. President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao have both made clean-tech development and deployment a cornerstone of their leadership, targeting the creation of millions of new clean-tech jobs in the process. Brazil, the European Union, India, Japan, and other nations are also aggressively pursuing clean-tech job creation – investing dollars and human capital and implementing supportive policies…”
- From the report: “The unprecedented level of interest and activity in clean-tech jobs is considerable, but there’s a reason for it. Many believe we are just at the beginning of the clean-tech jobs creation era, with clean tech offering the greatest opportunity for wealth and job creation (and global economic competitiveness) since the advent of the computer and the Internet…”

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- From the report: “Private investments, while declining in 2009 and certainly under pressure in the current economic climate, are creating jobs among a host of startups…TV stations, newspapers, and magazines across the globe are focused on the emerging phenomenon, with near daily coverage. And dozens of websites and social media outlets are now dedicated to the clean-tech jobs market…”
- From the report: “The move toward a clean-tech economy is also becoming evident in the transition taking place in communities across the U.S. and abroad. Formerly shuttered manufacturing facilities, often in hard-hit industrial areas, are being retrofitted from traditional old-line industry roles into new and emerging clean-tech activities. Clean-tech manufacturers are setting up shop in places where they can hire skilled workers laid off in previous plant shutdowns, with minimal retraining…”
- From the report: “We stand at a unique crossroads. The recent global financial crisis has been disastrous for already struggling old-line industries in the U.S., with the bankruptcy of General Motors heading a long list of business and employment woes…We believe this crisis can accelerate the transition to a clean-energy economy, with the creation of millions of new jobs in a wide range of clean-tech sectors. Those countries that take an active role will move out of the current crisis better positioned to lead in the next industrial revolution: clean technologies…”