Can Biden add many good paying energy jobs?
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, out-of-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.
The outlook for the energy industry’s coming decades, as Biden’s plan would have it, includes good wages and good benefits, reinforced by a revival of labor unions.
“I’m a union guy,” he said at a union training center in Pittsburgh. “I support unions, unions built the middle class, and it’s about time they started to get a piece of the action.”
A speedier transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy would hardly be as simple as longtime wildcatters transforming themselves into solar installers. 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.
Even with favorable policies, it can take generations to create jobs in individual industries. During his presidency, for example, Barack Obama encouraged tax incentives for the development of solar and wind energy. That effort did achieve some progress. Yet solar and wind remain to this day small sectors of the overall energy industry.
“If you’re thinking about incentives and disincentives, it’s easy to kill something; it’s hard to create something,” said Rob Sentz, chief innovation officer at Emsi, a data analytics firm.
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.”
That said, Sigelman estimates that 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 — and whom you ask. Many in the oil and gas industry say they fear that their wages would shrink if they transitioned to a job in renewable energy. But many economists say incomes might be comparable, whether a worker is laboring in an oil field or a wind farm.