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Experts agree: clean energy policy is smart economic policy! Research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) found that adopting a national policy to achieve a 25% renewable energy standard by 2025 would create more than three times as many jobs as producing an equivalent amount of electricity from fossil fuels.
Achieving this goal by 2025 would bring 202,000 new jobs nationally, stimulate $263.4 billion in new capital investment for renewable energy technologies, and generate $11.5 billion in new property tax revenue for local communities.
Read more about what the UCS had to say.
Jobs are already here.
In 2014, one out of every 78 new jobs in the U.S. was created by the solar industry, which employs nearly 174,000 full-time workers today. Employment in the solar industry was expected to grow by more than 20% in 2015 and demand for more highly trained, skilled workers is rising.
In 2014, New Jersey solar companies employed 7,200 people, ranking the state fifth in the country for solar employment according to The Solar Foundation.
Study Finds PennEast Pipeline Job Creation Claims Significantly Overstated
A recent study commissioned by the New Jersey Conversation Foundation and conducted by The Goodman Group found that the number of jobs claimed to be created by the PennEast gas pipeline project were significantly overstated in the proposal.
The Goodman Group, Ltd., a consulting firm specializing in energy and regulatory economics and economic development that analyzed the Keystone XL pipeline, concluded in its 71-page report that the PennEast analysis had overstated the total jobs to be created by designing and building the pipeline “by approximately two-thirds or more.”
The report also noted that construction jobs created would be “very short term in nature” and that “half or more” would go to workers residing outside New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Moreover, the Goodman Group concluded that ongoing economic benefits would be “infinitesimally small” in the context of the New Jersey economy. The PennEast data also contains numerous internal inconsistencies and deviations from best practices for analyzing the economic impacts of gas pipelines.
