Shift in Energy Employment: Clean Energy Sector Surpasses Fossil Fuels
More people work in the energy sector today than in 2019, almost exclusively due to growth in clean energy, which now employs more workers than fossil fuels.
Energy employment reached nearly 67 million in 2022 — growing by 3.4 million over pre-pandemic levels. Clean energy sectors added 4.7 million jobs globally over the same period and stand at 35 million, while fossil fuels jobs recovered more slowly after layoffs in 2020 and remain around 1.3 million below pre-pandemic employment levels, at 32 million. As a result, clean energy employment surpassed that of fossil fuels in 2021. More than half of job growth in this period is attributable to just five sectors: solar PV, wind, electric vehicles (EVs) and battery manufacturing, heat pumps and critical minerals mining. These five sectors employ around 9 million workers today. Solar PV is the largest of these sectors, at around 4 million jobs, while manufacturing of EVs and their batteries was the largest source of growth, adding globally well over 1 million jobs since 2019. Many of the new jobs are in construction and manufacturing, which represent over half of energy jobs today, and grew by 2.6 million jobs since 2019.