While the once-steady rise in solar employment has flattened and even declined slightly over the past two years, job creation in other clean energy sectors is booming. A recent report by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) finds that U.S. jobs in its “clean storage” and “clean vehicles” categories grew 14% and 16%, respectively, to 75,000 and 254,000.
The report ties the rise in batteries to deployment, which echoes earlier figures by Wood Mackenzie’s latest report which finds that the United States installed 80% more energy storage (as measured by MWh) in 2018 versus 2017, with more growth expected in future years.
The much larger “clean vehicles” category, which includes hybrid vehicles as well as electric vehicles (EVs) grew 16% to 254,000 jobs, 68,000 of which were in electric vehicles themselves. E2 notes that more than 7,000 jobs were brought to Nevada by Tesla’s Gigafactory alone, and that the county the factory is located in has nearly 2 clean energy/manufacturing jobs for every resident.
China dominates manufacturing
One of the ironies of U.S. job growth in these two industries is that the actual making of the lithium-ion batteries which are used exclusively in EVs and dominate stationary energy storage is increasingly dominated by China. More centrally, China also increasingly controls the supply of the three key processed materials that are needed to make these batteries.
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