As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office this week, he will be looking to make good on his campaign promise to create jobs and strengthen the economy. He needs look no further than energy efficiency. A new report shows it's already supporting at least 1.9 million US jobs.
The energy efficiency industry has a remarkably diverse workforce in the United States, ranging from appliance manufacturers and home retrofitters to cloud-based energy management service providers. But since energy efficiency involves so many sectors of the economy, the government can't collect statistics on it the way it can for the banking or auto industries. This makes it extremely difficult to quantify how many people are employed in energy efficiency-related businesses, because it's not as clear as counting the number of people who work in a car factory.
Last month, however, E4TheFuture and Environmental Entrepreneurs released a
report that does the best job I've seen yet of providing a reliable answer. Using a methodology similar to the one the government uses to produce its official statistics, they found that about 1.9 million people worked full- or part-time on energy efficiency last year. They found that total was set to increase by almost a quarter of a million this year, making energy efficiency the largest industry in the clean energy economy. It employs about twice as many workers as the auto industry (including auto parts manufacturers), and almost 10 times
as many workers as the oil and gas extraction industry. It's a big number.
