Report: Colorado clean energy industry job growth to hit 10.3% this year

This story has been updated with comments from Blake Jones.

Colorado’s clean energy sector could produce double-digit increases in new job creation, according to a new report outlining the industry’s position in the state.

The industry hiring grew by 4.8 percent in 2018, twice as much as the job growth recorded in every other industry across the state, according to the 2019 Clean Jobs Colorado report produced by Environmental Entrepreneurs, an advocacy group for green energy companies. Clean power businesses surveyed by the report’s authors expect hiring in the industry to accelerate through 2019 to as much as 10.3 percent.

SPONSORED CONTENT

The many benefits of simple, coordinated healthcare

Kaiser Permanente combines health care and coverage in one connected system to maximize employee health and minimize employer costs.

The clean power industry employed 59,666 people in Colorado last year, with more than half working in efficient lighting and heating and air conditioning, according to the Clean Jobs Colorado report. Solar companies employed 7,775 people last year while wind companies employed 7,318, making up the lion’s share of renewable energy jobs.

The Boulder metro area was home to 12,237 industry jobs, according to 2017 data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, while the Fort Collins-Loveland combined metro had 6,871 jobs and the Greeley metro had 3,840 in the same time period.

The report partially attributes that expected growth to a package of climate and clean energy bills passed by Colorado lawmakers in the previous legislative session, such as increasing the electric vehicle tax credit, tightening efficiency standards for appliances and setting economy-wide greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.

Blake Jones, a co-founder at Namaste Solar Electric Inc. in Boulder, told BizWest his company’s headcount increased by 15 percent last year and he expects to continue hiring into the future.

He attributes the industry’s bullish outlook on several factors, such as local governments making commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, technology driving down the cost of renewable power and increasingly bipartisan support for adding more renewable energy into the country’s energy supply. Those are outweighing headwinds to the industry, he said, such as tariffs raising prices on Chinese solar panels and other goods, and President Donald Trump’s pro-fossil fuel positions.

“It’s never been as positive and widespread in the public,” he said. “All those trends have never combined in the way they do now, and this is all with an administration that has not demonstrated itself to be very renewable energy or climate impact-friendly,” he said.