Biden To Promote Green Energy Jobs To Pennsylvania Unions | OilPrice.com

U.S. President Joe Biden is visiting Philadelphia on Thursday as he seeks to promote the benefits of green energy jobs to worker unions in Pennsylvania.

The Biden Administration bets on the creation of millions of good-paying jobs in the energy transition. But union workers in Pennsylvania are not so convinced that the clean energy solutions and technologies would be able to create a similarly high number of well-paid jobs, a dozen such workers have told Reuters.

The Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is expected to create more than 9 million good jobs over the next decade—an average of nearly 1 million jobs each year, an analysis commissioned by the BlueGreen Alliance from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found last year. 

Rising employment in clean energy led to the 3.8% jobs growth in the U.S. energy sector in 2022 when the industry outpaced the overall U.S. rise in employment, the annual report by the Department of Energy showed last month. 

Last year, the number of clean energy jobs rose in every state and grew by 3.9%, or by 114,000 jobs from 2021, according to the 2023 U.S. Energy and Employment Report (USEER). Clean energy jobs made up more than 40% of total energy jobs in 2022. Clean energy technologies accounted for more than 84% of net new electric power generation jobs, while the growth in battery electric vehicles (BEVs) jobs was almost 17 times faster than the increase in gasoline and diesel vehicle employment, the report showed. 

But the clean energy growth needs to be faster, and more skilled employees and workers are needed, analysts and industry say.

Currently, the number of professionals with green skills is lower than the talent companies seek to fill green roles, including in manufacturing, engineering, carbon accounting, green finance, or tracking corporate climate goals, research and analyses have shown.   

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

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