Will the US have the workforce it needs for a clean-energy transition?

Will the US clean-energy transition be hampered by a shortage of electricians, plumbers, and skilled construction workers? In this episode, Betony Jones, director of the DOE’s Office of Energy Jobs, talks about the challenge of bringing a clean energy workforce to full capacity and the need for job opportunities in communities impacted by diminished reliance on fossil fuels.

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David Roberts

Now that the Inflation Reduction Act has lit a fire under the clean-energy transition, a new worry has begun to emerge: can the US create the workforce it needs to build all of this stuff? And can it care for the fossil fuel workers who are displaced in the process?

Across the trades that will be necessary to build out clean energy — electricians, plumbers, construction — industries are reporting worker shortages. Meanwhile, entire communities are being disrupted and displaced by the closure of refineries and other fossil fuel facilities.

What can the government do to help growing industries create the job pipelines they need? And what can it do to help cushion the blow to fossil fuel communities?

To get to the bottom of these questions, I contacted Betony Jones, the director of the Office of Energy Jobs at the Department of Energy. She has spent years thinking about clean-energy workforce issues and working with industries to create shared job training and apprenticeship programs. We talked about the jobs that are coming, the jobs that are going away, and the need for an active hand in smoothing the transition.

With no further ado, Betony Jones. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.

Betony Jones

It's great to be here. Thank you.

David Roberts

You know, ever since the Inflation Reduction Act passed and the rest of the legislation sort of like kicking off a new era of clean energy acceleration, I've been thinking about what are the remaining kind of now the policy log jam has broken, what are the remaining impediments? What are the remaining dangers? And I've sort of narrowed it down to the four Horsemen. The four or four horsemen of the clean energy apocalypse political blowback, which is basically Republicans taking back over and undoing everything NIMBYism, which is the difficulty of building all the things we need to build interconnection queue and transmission i.e. making the grid big and robust enough. And then, fourth, workforce issues. I'm going to try to do a pod on all these eventually, but we're here to talk about workforce issues. So just by way of background, maybe start by telling us what your office is and what it's for and what it's intended to do.

Betony Jones

First, I just want to say when the Inflation Reduction Act passed, that was really game changing for someone like me who's been working at the nexus of climate change and labor issues for so long. And so to answer the question of what my office does, the Office of Energy Jobs at the U.S. Department of Energy is responsible for a few things, but one of them is making sure that the jobs that are being created from these historic investments are good, quality, family sustaining jobs that people want. And so writing the rules around the funding and how it goes out the door and how it's made accessible.

David Roberts

Was the office created by Biden, or has this been around a while?

Betony Jones

This iteration was created by Biden, but it has also been around for a while. I think Obama had an Office of Energy Jobs, and so did President Trump. But our office is really focused on, first and foremost, making sure that the investments are getting out into communities, that the investments are creating broadly shared prosperity and good jobs for American workers, and that we're investing in new industries in the domestic supply chain to provide the materials and equipment for this clean energy transition. So that's really exciting. It's actually just an absolutely incredible opportunity to show that we can address the climate crisis while creating real material benefits for American workers.

David Roberts

Yeah, you're really at the nexus there. That's a white hot area. So when I think about workforce issues and the clean energy transition, there's sort of two sides of it. There are the people in communities who are going to lose fossil fuel based jobs, and then there are the people in communities that are going to gain clean energy jobs. I want to start with the latter, although we will return to the former later. So there's all this work to be done electrifying and everything else. But I wonder, do we have a clear quantitative understanding or projection or good models or a sense of exactly what the job shift is going to be? I.e. Like how many jobs are going to be created in what industries, how many will be lost in what industries, or is there so much uncertainty that we're sort of adapting as we go?

Betony Jones

There's always uncertainty because nobody can tell the future. I mean, my office puts out the U.S. Energy Employment Report every year, which is a backward look at energy jobs. And we can see some trends in that backward look. But in terms of forecasting, that's really challenging to do. For the bipartisan infrastructure law, it's difficult to determine where exactly some of these investments are going to take place because for the Department of Energy and most of the energy investments, they're competitive. And so different private sector companies compete for funding, and then they decide where it is that they want to build their hydrogen hub or their battery factory or what have you.

And so it's hard to determine exactly where those jobs are going to be. But we do know that a lot of them, and I would say probably 75% of them are in the construction sector. And so this is traditional jobs. This is laborers and operating engineers, the folks who move heavy machinery, earth moving equipment to prepare the ground for these things or drill the geothermal wells. They're electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, iron workers. These traditional construction occupations. And it's not that different building a battery factory from building a data center or building a hospital, for that matter.

Construction is construction. The jobs that are created are mostly in traditional occupations sort of regardless of the technology that's being deployed. For the Inflation Reduction Act, this is the really game changing legislation because of the way that it's structured with tax incentives, so we expect to see those investments pretty much everywhere. Now, obviously for things like wind and solar geothermal, you're constrained by the location, by the availability of that resource geographically. But if you're building a factory to make solar panels or battery cells or EV charging stations, you're much less constrained geographically. So that's one thing.

I mean, communities all across the U.S. are competing for those types of investments and then at the same time and this maybe gets to the first part of your question there's fossil assets that can be repurposed for some of the things that we're trying to develop now. And so there's a lot of attention on how do we repurpose those fossil assets, these facilities that h