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A solar advocacy group called the Solar Foundation released a report this week showing that the solar power industry in the US employs 260,077 workers that spend half or more of their time on solar industry-related projects—representing a growth of 24.5 percent from last year. The numbers were gleaned from an annual census that the foundation takes, this year involving more than 500,000 phone calls and 60,000 e-mails to “known and potential energy establishments across the United States.”

 

The Solar Foundation admitted that next year is unlikely to see as much dramatic growth, although total employment in the solar industry is still expected to increase by 10 percent to approximately 286,000 solar workers.

The employment numbers from the Solar Foundation were recently included in a January 2017 Department of Energy (DOE) report (PDF) on energy-related jobs. The DOE noted in its report that it's sometimes difficult to count solar industry jobs because people employed installing residential and commercial solar systems are counted differently from, say, people who work at a utility, operating utility-grade solar panels. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, utilities only employed 2,800 workers on solar-specific generation, but that figure hides construction and maintenance jobs on projects that are “financed, owned, or directed by utilities.” The DOE wrote that it estimates only 20.6 percent of people employed in the solar industry work on utility-level projects—another 54.6 percent work in residential solar, and the remaining 24.7 percent work on commercially-focused solar installations.

The DOE also points out that the solar industry is interesting because despite all that employment in distributed solar (that is, non-utility solar), utilities still have a lot more solar energy capacity than homes and businesses—roughly 28,081,000 MWh compared to distributed solar's 16,974,000 MWh in 2016. “This imbalance reflects the fact that utility-scale generation typically produces more MWh’s per labor unit installed compared to distributed generation,” the DOE writes.

Source:Arstechnica