A report from the ILR School’s Climate Jobs Institute found that New York state has increased its solar installations by more than 2,000% over the past decade, but tabulating the exact number of solar employees who are performing this work has proved to be challenging.
Solar solutions: Workers face challenges in renewable energy sector
By David Nutt, Cornell Chronicle
The solar boom in New York state is not only powering homes, businesses and infrastructure; it is also generating jobs. Researchers at the ILR School’s Climate Jobs Institute (CJI) are helping to ensure the solar workforce is treated as fairly and equitably as employees in other industries.
“It’s an emerging sector. It raises all sorts of questions around job quality,” said Lara Skinner, CJI’s executive director. “We were seeing a lot of angst from both workers and communities about the fossil fuel plants being shut down, and then wondering, ‘What’s on the other side, what do we transition to, and what do the job opportunities look like in that space? Are these going to be good jobs? Will they pay as well as other energy jobs? Are we going to have good benefits, and healthy and safe working conditions?’”
In April 2024, the institute issued its first report on the conditions faced by NYS’s solar workforce, which found that the state’s rapid solar expansion may have relied on overworked transient labor.
Among the key findings:
- Many solar workers live outside New York state, and even more (42.8%) reported working for multiple employers. The majority also reported that they had relocated in order to work on New York state solar worksites, complicating efforts to calculate the number of employees in the field;
- Nearly 60% of solar workers surveyed said they received no benefits;
- One-third of workers are paid per panel installed – a practice that could incentivize unsafe conditions in the pursuit of productivity;
- 53% of workers said abuse of stimulants was a problem on their worksites, to “stay awake” and maximize earnings;
- White workers paid an annual salary made nearly twice as much as their Black and Hispanic counterparts;
- White workers were also more likely to report longer tenure with their employers; and
- Black workers were most likely to indicate they had experienced wage theft while working on a New York state solar project, yet workers of color were least likely to formally report their wage theft.
“Racial disparity issues are prevalent across many industries,” said Avalon Hoek Spaans, assistant director of research at CJI. “But, for solar and clean energy and climate jobs, I think the reason it’s so important to highlight them is because oftentimes green jobs are sold as an idea of a just transition and because they are good for the planet they would be inherently high quality and transformative. But the question is: Are they actually? What are the conditions? And who are the workers building out these solutions?”
The institute conducted a similar study of solar workforce conditions in Texas that found many of the same issues, particularly a lack of access to benefits.
“We have to rapidly scale solar in the state, also the country, and it’s going to take a lot of work to do that,” Hoek Spaans said. “But part of the reason we started these studies is the data reported on the job quality of renewable jobs is directly from industry and corporations. And so this was the first study of its kind that focused on perspective directly from the workforce.”
Lara Skinner, executive director of the Climate Jobs Institute.
The report notes that the state has increased its solar installations by more than 2,000% over the past decade.But tabulating the exact number of solar employees who are performing this work has proved to be challenging. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated the number of solar photovoltaic installers to be 27,760 nationwide in May 2022. But the same year, the Interstate Renewable Energy Council estimated the total number of solar sector jobs to be 171,558 nationally. Similarly, estimates of the number of solar construction workers in New York state ranged from 11,500 in 2022 to more than 14,500 in 2023, according to industry and government reports.
The discrepancy could be due to the fact that some organizations use data that includes other solar industry jobs, such as sales and professional services, the CJI report explains. But with so many laborers moving around the country and installing photovoltaics for multiple companies at multiple sites, an exact tally remains elusive.
Oil and gas workers fought hard for labor standards and safe conditions in their industry through organizing and unionization, Hoek Spaans said, but because the renewable energy industry is still evolving, many of those protections have not yet been won – however, the industry still has a responsibility to its workforce. And while the Inflation Reduction Act has turbocharged investment in clean energy projects, and solar and wind installers are among the fastest growing occupations in the country, there remains a lot of industry hype around job creation, according to Skinner and Hoek Spaans.
“A lot of what we think about is this rhetoric compared to reality,” Skinner said. “We’re talking about building a whole new climate-safe economy. It’s change in every single sector, and it’s millions of jobs that are going to be created. But thus far, we’re still struggling to see kind of the levels of high-quality job creation that we’d like to see from investment in clean energy.”
Solar may be booming in New York state, but it remains a relatively niche source of energy. In 2023, 46% of the state’s net electricity generation came from natural gas, 22% from hydroelectric, 22% from nuclear and 10% from renewable sources, with solar accounting for 5%, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
But every little bit helps, as New York state aims to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and then 85% by 2050 from 1990 levels, as determined by the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, signed into law in 2019.
As solar usage continues to grow across the state, a number of technical issues, such as transmission and battery storage, will need to be addressed. But equal attention should be paid to the people who are putting these systems in place, Hoek Spaans and Skinner said.
“We must center workers in the transition, and also understand the working conditions of the transition, because the only way to adapt and mitigate to climate change is reducing risks for so many Americans,” Hoek Spaans said. “And that can happen through creating high-quality union and family-sustaining jobs through clean energy solutions.”
Media Contact
Get Cornell news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe
