Close to 40,000 new “green jobs” were created in the United States in the second quarter of 2013, a new green jobs report from Environmental Entrepreneurs has found.
Environmental Entrepreneurs monitors job announcements in the relevant sectors in order to track growth. The organization found that almost 60 new projects were announced and launched across 27 states in the second quarter of this year. These 60 projects will generate 38,600 new green jobs, which is 1,200 more than the same period last year. For the whole of 2012, a total of 111,000 green jobs were created, and 2013 is set to exceed that total.
It comes as no surprise that the exponential growth we are seeing in solar power has led to the most jobs in renewable energy generation going to the solar sector, followed by the wind sector. Together these sectors accounted for 13,300 new jobs, and solar accounted for 10,400 of those.
New electricity smart grid and transmission projects accounted for 8,200 new jobs, and the all important (but perhaps less glamourous) energy efficiency sector accounted for 5,700 new jobs. Public transportation is another significant sector and 9,600 jobs were created there.
As Cleantechnica points out, the report didn’t even seem to include the booming green building sector, which accounted for an incredible 44% of all construction jobs in 2012. This sector is set to exceed $140 billion in revenue this year, according to the U.S. Green Building Council.
It seems clear from these results that the cleaning-up of the U.S. economy has started, and is gathering pace. I wonder how these figures will look when the renewable energy sector starts to become big, rather than the relatively small one it still is? Perhaps one day “green jobs” will be so ubiquitous that they’ll just be called “jobs” and the so called “green economy” will just be “the economy”. That’s where we need to get to.
Image CC licensed by Lauren Wellicome: Installing solar panels
Via Cleantechnica
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