Can Biden add energy jobs? Hope mixes with doubt

NEW YORK » Good-paying jobs — many of them.

That’s the seductive idea around which President Joe Biden is proposing a vast transformation of the energy sector, with the promise of making it far more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly. As Biden portrays it, his plan to invest in infrastructure — and accelerate a shift to renewable energy and electric vehicles, to more efficient homes and upgrades to the power grid — would produce jobs at least as good as the ones that might be lost in the process.

His plans call for 100% renewable energy in the power sector by 2035. To people who have devoted careers to the the fossil fuel industries, those plans may look more like a dire threat. To the president, though, outof-work oil workers could be shifted to other jobs — plugging uncapped oil wells, for example — and thousands more positions would be created to help string power lines and build electric vehicles and their components.

“We think that’s a lot of jobs to fill, and one of the key questions is: How do we build the right skill base that can help fill those jobs?” said Matt Sigelman, CEO of Burning Glass Technologies, a labor market analytics firm.

So many unknowns overhang the shift toward greener energy that no one knows how the industries and its jobs will evolve in the coming years. For one thing, many experts say the transition to electric vehicles will likely mean fewer factory workers than are now employed in producing internal combustion engines and complex transmissions. EVs have 30% to 40% fewer moving parts than vehicles that run on petroleum.

Yet economists have warned that climate change poses such a grave threat that the United States must accelerate its transition to renewable energy to ensure its economic security.

COULD GREEN-ENERGY JOBS REALLY REPLACE LOST FOSSIL-FUEL JOBS? » Even with favorable policies, it can take generations to create jobs in individual industries. The renewable energy industry employed about 410,000 people in 2019, including those in the solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, biomass and biofuels industries, according to

Burning Glass. By comparison, employment for oil and gas alone in 2020 was 516,000 counting extraction, pipelines, refining and other elements of the industry. An additional 485,000 people were working at gas stations, though gas station jobs are technically classified as retail, according to Burning Glass.

“It’s a pipe dream to imagine that we’re going to achieve full decarbonization in a short period of time,” Sigelman said. “Jobs in the carbon economy will continue in great numbers for some time to come.”

Sigelman estimates the renewable energy industry could grow up to 22% over the next five years to a total of 465,000 jobs.

WHAT ABOUT PAY? » It depends on the type of job.

The median annual pay of solar installers was about $44,650 in 2020, according to Emsi. For wind turbine service technicians it was about $52,100.

In the oil industry, derrick operators, rotary drill operators, service unit operators and excavating and loading machine operators earned median annual pay ranging from $44,700 to $55,000, Emsi says. The median for roustabouts and extraction work helpers was $37,000 to $39,000.

Oil and gas field service technicians earn a median of about $39,000 a year, Sigelman said. Those workers could, in theory, transition into such areas as electrical technician work, which pays roughly $25,000 more a year, or construction foreman jobs, whose median is about $27,000 more per year.

SOME JOBS SPAN THE DIVIDE » One point often missed in any debate over green energy vs. fossil fuel jobs is that the line between the two can blur. To install wind turbines, for example, you need truckers, electricians and mechanics.

Likewise, jobs involved in installing or repairing power and transmission lines are critical to both the renewable energy and fossil fuel industries. The renewables growth that Biden envisions will need a massive buildout of transmission and power lines to deliver electricity from the solar farms and wind farms on sunny plains to energy-gulping coasts. Whether for fossil fuel or renewable projects, electrical workers who string the lines are already in demand.