The first report, called the US Energy and Employment Report (USEER), comes from the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), and it looks at energy jobs across the US in all sectors of the industry. The second comes from the Solar Foundation, a pro-solar association that tracks jobs with a nation-wide survey from year to year.
The wind energy sector was the big winner here, as it employed 107,000 people in 2017, an increase of nearly 6 percent compared to 2016. The nascent battery storage industry “added almost 6,000 new jobs for a 12 percent growth rate in 2017,” the USEER notes. Generation from natural gas added 19,000 jobs and coal-fueled electricity generation did not see any new jobs added or any jobs lost, hanging to 92,000 jobs total.
