News Brief

Job Growth Follows First Full Year of IRA

Clean energy projects sparked job growth in 2023, growing the sector to nearly 3.5 million workers.

Charts showing the breakdown of U.S. clean energy job in five sectors in 2022 — The energy efficiency sector is the single biggest employer across the clean energy sector, while the clean vehicles sector experienced the highest rate of growth in 2023 (11%).
Image: E2, Clean Jobs America 2024. September 2024.

Clean energy jobs spiked in 2023, which according to the Clean Jobs America report from the nonpartisan business group E2, is partly attributable to the first full year of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). In 2023, alone, the clean energy economy grew by almost 150,000 jobs, a pace nearly two times faster than overall national job growth.

While clean energy jobs have been on an upward trend for years, 2023 saw the second biggest jump ever, just behind the post-pandemic recovery surge of 152,000 jobs in 2021.

“Clean energy jobs” are distributed across the following sectors, listed in descending order of total people employed:

Energy efficiency: 2,290,179 employed (+3.4% growth in 2023)
Renewable generation: 559,971 employed (+ 4.5% growth in 2023)
Clean vehicles: 410,420 employed (+11.0% in 2023)
Storage/grid: 158,423 employed (+4.7% growth in 2023)
Biofuels: 41,412 employed (+3.1% growth in 2023)

There are now more clean energy jobs than there are nurses nationwide, according to the report. And more than half the jobs added in the energy sector in 2023 were in clean energy—rather than non-clean energy. The study’s definition of clean energy jobs includes, for example, jobs in solar, wind, bioenergy, non-woody biomass, electric vehicles, energy efficiency, advanced heating and cooling, and advanced building materials—as well as jobs in the construction and delivery of professional services for those projects. It does not include jobs in corn ethanol, woody biomass, large or traditional hydroelectric, or nuclear.

Clean jobs are most highly concentrated in the same ten states as the previous year: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, Ohio, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. However, 2023 was the first year that each of the top ten states had at least 100,000 clean energy jobs at the time of the study. An interactive map on the E2 website shows distribution of clean energy jobs, by sector, across the United States.

Since the 2022 passage of the IRA, 340 major new clean energy projects have been announced, contributing 109,000 new jobs and $126 billion in private-sector capital by company estimates.

The authors suggest that the 2023 job growth “sets the stage for the next several years as the industry begins to feel the full impact from the historic investments and incentives in the IRA.” While the IRA can only be repealed with congressional approval, a Trump administration could claw back funding allocated to clean energy projects.