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At a time when many U.S. industries are reporting record job losses, one sector of the economy holds promise for potential growth: Green jobs.
How these jobs are defined and just how many there will be remains a question that will likely be debated for months or years to come. But one thing, at least, seems certain: The bulk of green jobs will come from the energy industry, as it strives to reduce its impact upon global warming by operating more efficiently and expanding the use of renewable resources and customer efficiency programs.
"Nobody has a definitive account of what green jobs are. It really is a matter of opinion and consensus building at this point," said Jennifer Cleary, author of "Preparing the Workforce for a 'Green Jobs' Economy," a research brief for the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.
"As renewable resources and efficiency programs grow and become a bigger part of the overall energy resource mix, the number of jobs that go with harvesting those resources are going to grow," said CEWD president Mary Miller. "And as utilities turn more to renewable resources for electricity generation, they will need transmission and distribution lines to get those resources to customers. That translates to a need for a larger workforce to get those power lines built."
Many of these jobs will not be new occupations but rather traditional occupations that require an additional layer of "green skills and knowledge," the research brief concluded. In other words, a maintenance technician who works on a turbine in a coal-fired plant can also perform the same tasks on a wind turbine. Engineers who design process flow in a generating station can also design emissions control processes in that same station. Natural gas system design engineers can also design systems using biomass. Heating and air ventilation workers are needed to install more efficient heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems; construction workers will build more efficient and environmentally friendly power plants and work on upgrading the nation's electric grid.
The Center for Energy Workforce Development (CEWD), a nonprofit consortium of electric, natural gas and nuclear utilities and their associations, defines green energy jobs as those that include improving energy efficiency, energy generation and transmission and distribution. In addition to the traditional jobs that are necessary to generate and deliver energy, examples of specific jobs include those that perform energy audits for homes and buildings; retrofits and weatherization; and the manufacturing, installation, repair and maintenance of renewable energy systems for wind, solar, biofuel, hydro, clean coal and nuclear.
While federal agencies set guidelines for what will define green jobs and how stimulus grants will be awarded to promote them, energy stakeholders should prepare by "building strategic partnerships among industry, labor unions, and educators" in order to link education and training with the needs of employers, Cleary's paper concludes.
CEWD has been doing just that over the past three years with the development of State Energy Workforce Consortia. The consortia are collaborations between education, the workforce system and the industry. There are 22 states represented by the consortia at this time.
"Some of the consortia are in the planning stages and others are well into implementing state-wide initiatives that translate into a future energy workforce that will match the needs of the industry, job seekers and the new greener economy," said Ann Randazzo, Executive Director, CEWD.
Energy Efficiency
Some regional workforce organizations are also focusing on a specific segment of the industry. For example, for the past year, the Northwest Energy Efficiency Task Force (NEET) has been trying to assess where utilities in the Pacific Northwest will secure their future workforce from, said Barbara Hins Turner, Executive Director of the Washington State Center of Excellence for Energy, at Centralia College.
As the educational arm of the task force, Hins Turner has taken the lead in reviewing and studying the training programs available in the four-state region of Washington, Oregon, Montana and Idaho. She is trying to identify primarily those programs that train workers for jobs in energy efficiency, determine whether training standards exist and find out where students are being placed.
"We're bringing our institutions together to collaborate to address everyone's needs," Hins Turner said.
Many of the new jobs, she said, will be in energy auditing, though it's unclear how many will be new hires and how many will be promoted internally from jobs such as customer service.
"Energy auditors have been employed by the utilities for 20 years, but on a very small scale," said Hins Turner, who previously worked at Portland General Electric. "These jobs aren't new. What's happening is that utilities are expanding their energy efficiency departments."
Energy auditors check homes and businesses to see how much energy they are consuming and if they could reduce usage with retrofits, new windows or added insulation, for example.
Energy Transmission & Distribution
The advent of "smart" electricity grids is also helping energy companies to operate more efficiently, thereby reducing carbon emissions. Xcel Energy is building SmartGridCity in Boulder, Colo. , along with partners in the technology industry, to modernize the grid and provide new, innovative and greener ways to deliver power, said Candace Bowman, the company's Director of Talent Management.
By retrofitting substations, digitizing the grid and putting smart meters in the homes of up to 25,000 customers, Xcel Energy is developing a system that will allow customers to view real-time energy use and control smart in-home devices to manage their environmental impact and personal carbon footprint, Bowman said.
The new technology means systems operators, service representatives and others involved in installation and maintenance will need some specialized training, Bowman said. Xcel Energy is working through a state energy consortium to add capacity to training programs for these jobs.
"We have enough people interested," she said. "We just can't train them fast enough."
Energy Generation
NextEra Energy, a wind power generating company that sells to utilities or into wholesale markets, has watched its workforce needs rapidly grow over the past few years. The company currently employs about 600 people in the field - up from 450 in 2007 - and continues to hire.
"We've been in the renewable business long before it became trendy or sexy," said Steven Stengel , noting that the company has been producing wind power since the 1980s. NextEra provides about 6,300 megawatts, or enough wind power to meet the needs of about 1.5 million average homes in 16 states and Canada.
To find qualified workers for these jobs, NextEra collaborates with Texas State Tech College and several other community colleges across the nation to help develop curriculum for basic skills training programs. The company provided lecturers for Texas State's program as well, to ensure that potential candidates were getting the skills they needed.
"We know that the students that come out of this program will have the knowledge that we feel is important when they hit the job site," Stengel said. However, training in the specialty skills needed to install and run wind turbines is delivered in-house.
"If we can find the people who have the general background that we think will make them successful in this industry, we can do the lion's share of the training ourselves to give them the specific skill set they need."
Though having a mechanical or engineering background is helpful, Stengel's not worried about finding job candidates familiar with those specialties so much as he'd like to find people who are eager to learn.
"We're in an environment in an industry that is changing rapidly, so people that are interested in learning and can adapt to change, those people will do well," he said.
Job Training
Training for renewable energy jobs is also under pressure to expand. The state college and university system in Minnesota has been working with businesses to provide training for workers at ethanol plants and wind farms for several years. But as the demand for renewables has grown, so, too, has the need for a more efficient means of delivering training for these jobs.
The problem, said Gail O'Kane, System Director for Education Industry Partnerships at Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, was that in such a large state, there wasn't a big enough volume of workers in need of training at each educational setting to make offering a program at each economically feasible. Hiring sufficient faculty with the proper expertise was also a challenge.
Enter the Minnesota Energy Workforce Consortium and a $1-million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). By working together, state industry and education groups have now leveraged funding, expertise and resources to develop energy-related curriculum that can be offered online as well as on site, and addresses a wide range of energy workforce development needs.
The courses, offered through a 10-college collaborative, address job skills common to traditional and alternative energy technician careers through a core curriculum of math, science and technical training, with the opportunity to move into specialty areas such as fossil fuels, wind, solar and biofuels for further certification.
Xcel Energy, the No. 1 wind energy provider in the country and fifth in the country in providing solar power, took a leading role in forming the state energy consortium behind the push for curriculum development.
The program relies upon the collaborative efforts and funding of numerous groups. In addition to $1 million in DOL grant money, the program received $237,500 in state funds. Another $115,000 - including funds for scholarships - will come through a Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) grant that Minnesota received from the U.S. Department of Labor to develop its renewable energy economy in southern and western parts of the state. Xcel Energy is also committed to sharing its equipment needed for the power courses.
Ensuring a pipeline of workers trained in traditional skill areas but also prepared to specialize as needed is one of the many tasks being addressed by CEWD. In 2008, the Center completed work on an Energy Competency Model for the industry. The competency model validates the Heldrich research brief by documenting the foundational skills that are needed by energy workers whether they will be working in generation, transmission or distribution. Job specific skills for renewable energy and energy efficiency add to the personal effectiveness, academic, workplace and industry-wide technical competencies that are needed in all job categories.
"By adding credentials for green skills to training programs that already offer fundamental skills, we are creating an energy career path that leads to multiple options in the industry," Randazzo said. "Creating 'stackable credentials' for green skills creates a workforce that is flexible and able to adapt to the myriad of changes that are coming as part of this new green economy."