FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
THE USEER: 2016-2020

2020 U.S. Energy & Employment ReportFIVE-YEAR TRENDS

The USEER: 2016-2020
The 2020 USEER is the fifth iteration of the annual energy andemployment report. This section serves as a summary analysis of the past
5 years of US energy and employment data.
Included are the five major energy, energy efficiency, and motor vehicles
technologies, the first three of which comprise the Traditional Energy
sector:
•
•
•
•
•

Fuels
Electric Power Generation (EPG)
Transmission, Distribution, and Storage (TDS)
Energy Efficiency (EE)
Motor Vehicles (MV) including Component Parts

In 2019, U.S. energy, energy efficiency, and motor vehicles firms employed
more than 8.27 million Americans, comprising 5.4 percent of the U.S.
workforce.

|2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORTThe traditional sectors—focused on the production of fuels
and electricity and their transmission and distribution to end
users—employ 3.3 million Americans. Meanwhile, thedownstream sectors of energy efficiency and motor vehicles
focused increasingly during the last five years on reducing
consumption of the fuels and electricity produced upstream.

5-2

In spite of these contradictory tendencies,
employment in these five sectors of theeconomy has grown 12.4 percent from2015-2019, outpacing the general
economy’s employment growthrate (6.0 percent).1 In total, these
sectors added nearly 915,000 jobs
to the US economy over the past 5 years,
representing more than 10.7 percent of all
new employment.

12.4%
Employment in
USEER sectors hasgrown 12% from2015-2019

The decoupling of energy consumption from job growth isone of the important trends noted in the 2016-2020 USEERs.
A second trend is the fact that the deployment of newtechnologies in all five sectors has driven net job growth,

1 BLS QCEW Q2 2019.

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
even while the displacement of old technologies has led tojob loss in specific subsectors. The transition from coal-fired
generation as the largest source of electricity in the UnitedStates in 2015 to natural gas in 2017 is the clearest example ofsuch displacement and will be explored later in this summary.
Finally, the role of energy efficiency, both in the built
environment and in transportation, cannot be overstated as acontributor to job growth. While fuel efficiency jobs data inthe motor vehicles sector was not collected in 2015, energy
efficiency and fuel efficiency contributed to over 400,000
new jobs in the last five years.
Figure 1.
Employment by Major Technology, 2015-20192
3,000,000
2,556,492
2,378,893

2,500,000
2,000,000
1,383,646

1,500,000
1,148,893
1,000,000

799,472

500,000

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

0
Fuels

Electric Power
Generation

Transmission,
Distribution,and Storage

2015

2017

|

2018

Motor Vehicles

2019

Note: EPG figures do not include less-than-50-percent solar jobs.
In 2019, there were 97,359 such jobs.

2 2015 data for EE and TDS have been omitted due to methodological changes between 2015 and 2016, rendering

those data incomparable to future data.

5-3

2016

EnergyEfficiency

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS

Fuels
Fuels sector employment grew more than 4 percent from 2015-2019,adding more than 46,000 new jobs. This growth rate is slightly lower thanfor the national economy. More than other sectors, fuels employment isaffected by global commodity prices which have fluctuated significantly
since the introduction of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. These
two technologies are leading the United States to once again become anet energy exporter.3
In its 2020 Annual Energy Outlook, the Energy Information Administration(EIA) projects that U.S. production in these energy sectors will growsignificantly, but that U.S. energy consumption will grow moderately,
assuming current laws and regulations continue.4 Although production inpetroleum and natural gas has risen rapidly in the last decade,
employment has grown more slowly as productivity has increased, in partas a reaction to sharp global price declines that have forced efficiency
initiatives.

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORTPetroleum drives the U.S. fuel economy, employing more than 53
percent of the Fuels sector or more than 615,500 people. However, since
petroleum and natural gas fuels are frequently produced jointly, it cansometimes be difficult to differentiate between jobs in these two sectors.
In 2017, the Bureau of Labor Statistics redefined the distinction between
the mining and extraction jobs in petroleum and natural gas, leading to a
relative increase in petroleum jobs and a similar decline in natural gas.
However, when petroleum and natural gas fuels jobs are combined toeliminate the effect of this redefinition, the two fuels have gone from
818,000 jobs in 2015 to 891,000 in 2019, a growth rate of 8.9 percent. As
mentioned, this growth in production coincided with overall price declines.
Not surprisingly, coal fuels have seen a sharp 18 percent decline over thesame time period, shedding 17,000 jobs. Much of this decline was driven
by the closures of coal-fired generation, discussed elsewhere in the 2020
USEER report, and its replacement by natural gas and renewablegeneration. Together, fossil fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas) employed
84 percent of Fuels workers, or nearly 967,000 employees in 2019. As
reported in the USEER state profiles, 535,000 of these employees areengaged in mining and extraction and 88 percent of those live in just 10
states, underscoring the long-term difficulty in responding to changing
energy production.

3 Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration [EIA], Annual Energy Outlook 2020 With Projections

to 2050 [AEO2020] (Washington, DC: EIA, 2020), 11.

|

4 EIA, AEO2020, 10

5-4

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
While alternative fuel technologies do not maintain similar market share,some categories have undergone relatively rapid growth since 2015 whileothers have declined. Biomass fuels, (non-woody and woody combined)
employed 54,100 workers in 2019 and grew 65 percent since 2015.
However, corn ethanol employment declined by over 12,000 jobs, or 26
percent.
Figure 2.
Fuels Employment by Detailed Technology, 2015-2019
700,000
615,528600,000
500,000
400,000
275,924300,000
200,000
100,000
083,60575,443

Coal

34,866
Petroleum Natural Gas|

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

2015

5-5

2016

Corn
Ethanol

2017

20,694

Other NonWoody
Biomass

2018

33,426

Woody
Biomass

2019

9,406
Nuclear
Fuel

Other

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS

Electric Power Generation
During the last five years, Electric Power Generation has experienced asignificant shift in generation sources. In 2015, coal and natural gas eachgenerated 33 percent of the electricity produced in the United States. Fiveyears later, natural gas had increased to 39 percent while coal had fallen to
24 percent. In addition, the share of electricity generated from renewablesources had risen from 14 percent to 19 percent. Within the renewables
sector, half of that growth came from wind, with the remaining half split
between solar and hydro. Wind and hydro each produce slightly morethan 7 percent of the nation’s electricity, while solar produces slightly lessthan 3 percent.5
Figure 3.
Electric Power Generation by Fuel Type, 2015-2019
1,600
1,400

billion kilowatt hours

1,200
1,000
800
600
400
200

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT02015
Natural Gas

2016
Renewables|

5 EFI calculation from data at EIA, AEO2020, 62.

5-6

2017
Nuclear2018
Coal

Petroleum

2019

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
Figure 4.
Renewable Electric Power Generation, 2015-2019
350

billion kilowatt hours

300
250
200
150
100
50
0
2015

2016
Solar

Wind

2017
Geothermal

2018
Hydro

2019

Other

This transition in generation sources has been reflected in the employment
shifts in the sector. USEER employment data for 2015 is incomplete and thus,
cannot provide a reliable baseline for all sectors. 6 However, in 2015, the EPG
sector employed 622,000 Americans. Over the next five years, the sector
added over 177,000 jobs with the increases in employment centered, at first,
in solar and then in natural gas, wind, CHP, and other low carbon
technologies. Today, the sector employs 799,000 Americans.

|

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

Solar jobs, which had grown rapidly in the preceding six years, wererelatively stagnant from 2016-2019, losing jobs in 2017 and 2018 andbouncing back in 2019. Currently, solar employs 248,000, down from its
high point of 260,000 in 2016.

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Job loss was most pronounced in coal-fired generation, which lost morethan 13,000 jobs in 2018 and 2019, declining from 92,000 in 2016 to
79,000 in 2019. Natural gas, now the largest fuel source for electricity
generation, added 33,600 jobs in the last four years and employs 122,000.
Advanced, low-emissions natural gas actually added almost 40,000 newjobs, but traditional natural gas technologies declined.
Wind, which surpassed hydro as the largest producer of renewableelectricity in 2019, added 16,000 new jobs in the last four years and now
employs 115,000 while traditional and low-impact hydro employ 68,000
combined. Other low-emission technologies, including biofuels generation,
geothermal, and CHP, all experienced growth.

6 The 2016 USEER did not distinguish between different fossil fuel generation. It also combined majority time andless than majority time solar jobs. Subsequent editions of the USEER differentiated between these two. The 2020
USEER uses majority time solar jobs only for overall generation employment comparisons.

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
Nuclear generation shares with renewables the most zero-emission
electricity production at 19 percent. Nuclear generation employment hascontinued to decline slowly over the last four years, losing 7,200 jobs.
At the state level these shifts in technology employment wereexperienced unevenly in different parts of the country, underscoring the
economic and community difficulties associated with an energy transition.
In 2019, for instance, a majority of solar employment was found in just fivestates—California, Massachusetts, New York, Florida, and Texas. Meanwhile,
83 percent of the job losses in coal-fired generation were concentrated in 15
states. One state, Ohio, lost almost 25 percent of those jobs.
Figure 5.
EPG Employment by Detailed Technology, 2015-2019
300,000

250,000

248,034

200,000

150,000
114,774
100,000

79,71175,661|2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

55,4685-860,916

46,15150,00012,304
8,794
0

Majority
Time
Solar

Wind

Geo

Low
Hydro

2015

43,52041,417

12,722
Trad Adv Nat Nuclear
Hydro
Gas

2016

2017

2018

Coal

Oil &
Other
Petrol2019

Nat GasOther Bio/CHPFIVE-YEAR TRENDS

Transmission, Distribution, and Storage
Employment growth in the Transmission, Distribution and Storage (TDS)
sector has been driven by several key factors, including the expansion ofdomestic oil and gas production, the deployment of new renewable
resources, grid modernization, the introduction of smart technologies,
and a rising demand for energy storage. Unlike the EPG sector, where
new technologies are displacing the old, in TDS, the new technologies
represent the expansion of — or augmentation to — existing infrastructure.
As a result, there has been steady employment growth over the last five
years with little resulting dislocation.
As with EPG, improvements in the USEER survey in 2016 prevent exact
comparisons between 2015 and 2019, since that survey expanded thenumber of manufacturing jobs included in the results by over 80,000.
Nonetheless, TDS added the second most jobs from 2015 to 2019, withmore than 156,000 new jobs, or nearly 13 percent growth. Currently, 1.38
million Americans work in this sector. (As described elsewhere in thisreport, this number does not include retail jobs such as gasoline stations.)

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORTTDS employees are more heavily concentrated in the construction andutilities industries (at 40 and 33 percent, respectively) than EPG workers(at 37 and 22 percent). This, of course, reflects that 79 percent, or morethan 985,300 TDS employees, build or maintain electrical transmission anddistribution lines or oil and gas pipeline systems. Traditional TDS hasgrown 8 percent since 2016,7 adding 71,900 workers to the TDS workforce.
In 2018 and 2019, 48 and 42 percent of construction firms respectively
reported that a majority of their revenues came from grid modernizationor other utility-funded projects, reflecting the close reliance of theseindustry and workforce sectors on each other. A majority of the new jobs
created in TDS from 2016 to 2019, 74,200, were in construction.
Smart grid and micro grid technologies have also experienced rapid
employment growth since 2016, growing 30 and 39 percent respectively.
Smart grid and micro grid technologies added a combined 11,700 jobs to
the TDS sector. Battery storage has also experienced strong growth since2016, adding 18,300 new jobs, or 38 percent growth, for a total of 65,900
workers in 2019.

7 Methodological changes to the USEER survey instrument in 2016 allowed for disaggregation of several detailed|

technologies. For this reason, comparison of detailed technologies in TDS are limited to 2016-2019.

5-9

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
Figure 6.
TDS Employment by Detailed Technology, 2016-2019

1,200,000

985,323

1,000,000

800,000

600,000

400,000

200,000
117,932
65,90425,631

20,742 20,464

9,849

8,548

|

5-10

2016

2017

2018

O
th
er
St
or
ag
e

Ba
tte
ry

Hy
dr
o
pe
d

Pu
m

O
th
er
TD

n
ni
za
tio

Gr
id

M
od
er

Gr
id
Sm
ar
t

M
ic
ro

O
th
er
Gr
id

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

Tr
ad
iti
on
al
T

D

0

2019

Note: Does not include commodity flow employmentthat works to transport fuels by rail, truck, air, or water(129,252 employees in 2019).

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS

Energy Efficiency
Energy Efficiency employment grew the most significantly of the fivesurveyed sectors over the past 5 years, adding just over 400,000 jobs.
Its growth rate of 20 percent was over three times that of the overall
economy. Today, the EE sector employs nearly 2.38 million Americans.
Many factors have contributed to the continued growth of energy
efficiency jobs over the last five years. First, are the high number ofstates—30—that have active energy efficiency standards or voluntary
programs. Seven of these were enacted or renewed in the last five years.8
Second, 75 percent of utilities now administer energy efficiency programs
at the local level, encouraging the deployment of new appliances, lighting
systems, insulation, and HVAC equipment.

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORTAt the federal level, over 50 new energy efficiency standards wereadopted by the Department of Energy, while the EPA expanded its
ENERGY STAR® residential and commercial building certification
programs. Today, 231,000 construction workers work on ENERGY STAR
certified residential home construction, while 255,000 construction
employees work on ENERGY STAR certified commercial and industrial
projects.
Another important trend is the increasing number of employees that
construction firms report spending the majority of their time working
with energy efficiency technologies. As of 2019, 56 percent of EE workers
were employed in the construction industry. In 2015, the number of these
employees working the majority of their time with energy efficiency
technologies was 64.8 percent. By 2019, the number had risen to 78
percent. The largest jump occurred in 2016, when the number of
employees doing energy efficiency work for traditional HVAC companies
dropped sharply and rose significantly for those working with ENERGYSTAR appliances, including HVAC systems.
Employment across detailed technologies in the EE sector has been
relatively stable across the last four years with most technologies
showing growth. In reviewing residential building energy consumption, theEIA projects a 17 percent residential energy decrease from 2019 to 2050 in
its Annual Energy Outlook 2020, explaining, "The main factors contributing
to this decline include gains in appliance efficiency, onsite electricity
generation (e.g., solar photovoltaic), utility energy efficiency rebates, risingresidential natural gas prices, lower space heating demand, and acontinued population shift to warmer regions.”9 EIA expects similar

8 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=32332'|

9 EIA, AEO2020, 118.

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FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
declines over the next decade in commercial energy intensity with thelargest impact coming from the deployment of efficient lighting systems.

|

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORTENERGY STAR Appliances (including HVAC) and Traditional HVAC
employed 26 and 25 percent of total EE workers in 2019 and added
56,300 and 77,800 jobs respectively between 2016 and 2019. EfficientLighting technologies added 52,500 jobs during that same four-year
period. One of the most important industry sectors of growth between
2016 and 2019 has been the Professional and Business Services sector
which added 113,000 jobs.

5-12FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
Figure 7.
EE Employment by Detailed Technology, 2016-2019
700,000

608,427598,375

600,000
500,000

450,470
380,299

400,000
300,000

211,323

200,000

129,998

100,000
0
EfficientLighting

Traditional
HVAC

Renewable Energy STAR Advanced
Heating and Appliances and Recycled
Cooling
Building
Materials

2016

2017

2018

Other

2019

Figure 8.
EE Employment by Industry, 2016-2019
1,600,000
1,400,000

1,295,783

1,200,000
1,000,000
800,000
600,000|

2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

400,000

5-13

484,482
321,582
180,337

200,000

44,1080Manufacturing

Wholesale
Trade
2016

Professional &Business
Services
2017

2018

Construction

2019

Other Services

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS

Motor Vehicles and Component Parts
Motor Vehicles, the largest surveyed sector, employed 2.56 million
Americans in 2019. Since 2015, the sector added 134,300 jobs representing
just over 5.5 percent growth.
The preceding decade has been one of the most dynamic in the global
motor vehicles industry since its inception with record production
coinciding with dramatic technology shifts. In 2012, the United States
adopted the most aggressive fuel economy standards in the world, whilein 2019 multiple global automotive companies—Toyota, Ford, GM, Volvo,
VW, and Tesla, among others—made announcements about vehicle
electrification timelines and/or multiple new EV model introductions andproduction expansions.
One of the goals of the USEER was to track how the introduction of fueleconomy measures including new technologies, light-weighting, materials
substitution, and the growth of EVs, hybrids, plug-ins, and other alternative
fuels vehicles would affect jobs in the overall industry.
Between 2015 and 2019, the Motor Vehicles industry added 76,000
alternative fuels vehicles jobs, rising from 190,300 to 266,400. During
the last four years, the USEER tracked the shifts in domestic production offive specific vehicle types—all electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, hybrids,
natural gas, and hydrogen/fuel cells. Of those categories, the all-electricvehicles showed the most job growth, adding 36,000 jobs.
Figure 9.
Alternative Fuels Vehicles Jobs, 2015-2019|2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

120,000

5-14

100,000
80,00060,00040,00020,0000Hybrid2016

2017

Plug-in Hybrid

All-Electric

2018
Natural Gas

2019
Hydrogen/Fuel Cell

FIVE-YEAR TRENDS
In 2016, the USEER also started tracking the number of jobs in the
Component Parts sector that contributed to achieving the 2012 fueleconomy standards. In 2016 that number was 489,000, or 44 percent of
all jobs in component parts. That number has fluctuated up and down,
annually, by 3 percent and now stands at 494,000.
One clear conclusion to draw from the changes in Motor Vehicles
employment over the last decade, since the end of the Great Recession,is that fuel efficiency and electrification technologies have helped
rejuvenate job growth in the sector. Motor Vehicle manufacturing has
added approximately 220,000 jobs since 2010 with 86,000 of thosecoming during the last five years, well after the introduction of the newfuel efficiency standards.
Repair and Maintenance is the other major sector of the Motor Vehicles
industry, comprising 39 percent of the jobs. It has also experienced
significant growth, adding over 61,500 jobs.
Figure 10.
MV Employment by Industry, 2015-2019
1,200,000
1,000,000

1,007,138

962,687

800,000
600,000

515,440|2020 U.S. ENERGY AND EMPLOYMENT REPORT

400,000

5-15

200,000
71,2270

Manufacturing

Wholesale Trade
2015

2016

2017

Professional &Business Services
2018

2019

Repair &Maintenance