MASSACHUSETTS OFFICIALS ISSUED A REPORT earlier this week indicating the state’s “clean energy industry” continued its explosive growth this year, boosting employment 11.9 percent to nearly 99,000 people, or 3.3 percent of the state’s workforce. The numbers are head-turning, particularly with lawmakers debating energy legislation on Beacon Hill, but the report itself is a bit of a black box.
The report offers incredible detail about the 98,895 clean energy industry jobs in Massachusetts and provides a breakdown by business sector. For example, nearly half of the industry’s jobs are in the energy efficiency area, and most of those involve retrofitting existing buildings. The state’s solar photovoltaic industry, which is battling on Beacon Hill over a key financial incentive for its customers, has seen its job ranks grow from 8,400 workers in 2013 to 14,820 today, according to the report.
Overall, the state report said, the clean energy industry in Massachusetts has more workers than the life sciences industry and half as many as the state’s financial services sector.
Yet where those numbers come from is hard to grasp. The methodology section of the report said the information was gathered through online and telephone surveys of 503 of the 2,270 businesses previously identified as clean energy firms and of a “representative, clustered sample” of companies in 18 industry codes identified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as potentially related to clean energy.
The report identifies the previously identified clean energy firms as the “known universe” and the companies in the 18 industry codes as the “unknown universe.” The survey results of those two universes were used to extrapolate results for the clean energy industry as a whole, yielding 47,098 workers in the known universe and 51,027 workers in the unknown universe, for a total of 98,895.
Greg Sullivan, the research director at the Pioneer Institute, said there is not enough information provided in the clean energy industry report to gauge whether its numbers are accurate. “My gut reaction is that the job numbers are way too big,” he said.
Sullivan became familiar with job counting in doing an analysis of life sciences employment in Massachusetts that was cited in the clean energy industry report. He said reports of this type come across as mathematically precise but include all sorts of hidden value judgments. “The definition of clean energy is in the eye of the beholder,” he said.
Phil Jordan of BW Research Partnership, which was paid $111,500 by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to conduct the survey, said his company went to great lengths to generate accurate information about the state’s clean energy industry, but he acknowledged that the definition of a clean industry job is not always clear.
For example, should workers at a Home Depot that sells energy-efficiency products be included in the clean energy industry? Jordan said no. He said the same goes for an energy efficiency manager working at a manufacturing plant. Jordan also said not all of the jobs in the clean energy industry are new. In some cases, workers or entire companies shift their focus toward clean energy. An electrical contractor, for example, might start installing solar arrays. Or a construction worker might shift to energy retrofits.
“We tried to create as best we can as a private organization the type of information the Bureau of Labor Statistics would put together if it conducted a study to answer these questions,” Jordan said. A number of other states and private organizations have hired BW Research to conduct similar studies.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on employment in the “green goods and services” sector in 2010 and 2011, but then discontinued the work in the wake of federal budget cuts. The 2011 BLS data indicate there were 3.4 million green goods and services jobs in the United States, including 88,924, or 2.8 percent of the total, in Massachusetts. The BLS definition of green goods and services appeared to be much broader than the definition of clean energy used by BW Research. It included government workers enforcing environmental regulations and employees of commuter rail systems, used merchandise stores, and nature parks.
In Spain, for each job created by clean energy 2.2 jobs are lost due to increasing rates. Wind and solar have no capacity value, therefore they only serve to increase the cost of electricity. Increasing rates move jobs to places with lower costs.
MassCEC , funded by an added percentage on our electric rates, needs to be dismantled. In addition to being a drag to the economy, they have funded wind projects, and dubious feasibility studies for wind projects that have created air pollution noise in neighborhoods in Falmouth, Fairhaven, Kingston, and the Hoosac mountain area. The air pollution noise is so intense that widespread complaints have been filed. Subsequent measurements by MassDEP have found significant violations of state noise pollution regulations.
Currently, Four 2 MW 500 foot high wind turbines are being erected in Plymouth, next to the Bourne border, in violation of Bourne by-law with MassCEC support. These will clearly be in violation of Bourne by-law as well as MassDEP noise pollution policy. The failure of MassDEP to step in and regulate this cross-border loophole, has forced Bourne to assume the heavy expense of authorizing legal action to stop the project, with little chance of success.
MassCEC is a useless booster club for the wind and solar industries. and MassDEP needs to do their job to protect the health and safety of nearby residents.
Bruce, thanks for writing about this, and for looking with a fine tooth comb through the report job numbers.
Sadly, many things don’t add up in our clean energy policy. If we at least get more disciplined looking at numbers, budgets, efficiency, scale – maybe then there’ll be hope for the environment.
What worries me is that we are slating Pilgrim plant for closure – the biggest producer of clean electricity in the state – and the state won’t come to its rescue. But the state wants to spend hundreds of millions in direct and indirect subsidies for other, non-scalable technologies that have no chance of making up for the loss of Pilgrim.
Missing is a simple cost/benefit analysis, with the goal of decreasing carbon emissions at a relatively affordable cost. The cost will not be zero, to be sure, but we have to be very transparent in what the cost is and who gets to pay it.
The December 3, 2015 article “Do clean energy jobs add up?” in Commonwealth Magazine raises questions about the methodology of counting jobs in Massachusetts in the annual report on the clean energy sector prepared for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. At Greentown Labs based in Somerville, MA, we can speak to what we see on the ground as a participant in a very vibrant ecosystem. In our community of clean technology startups, job growth rates have exceeded those outlined in the report and we expect that to continue.
Greentown Labs began in 2011 with four startups and a handful of entrepreneurs who banded together after graduating MIT to find affordable space to build prototypes for their wind, energy storage, energy efficiency, and efficient compression technologies. Today, Greentown Labs is the largest clean technology incubator in the country, home to more than forty companies, most of them focused on building physical products to solve the world’s biggest energy and environmental challenges. We provide space, resources, and access to investors and networks to help new companies grow and fund their businesses.
These forty companies, along with nearly that many that have moved out of our space and moved into to their own, employ more than 400 people. Many of these companies occupied a desk and as little as 100 square feet of lab space at their start with us. Two years later, they employ up to 20 people and operate out of their own 5,000 to 10,000 square foot facilities in Greater Boston and beyond. Our startups have raised more than $130 million in funding.
We believe the clean energy ecosystem is thriving because it leverages and builds upon the commonwealth’s world-class education cluster, history of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, supportive policy environment, and private sector that is willing to partner to bring new ideas to market. Our corporate partners, leading energy companies like National Grid, EnerNOC, Engie, Shell, Saint-Gobain and GE, are working with and alongside entrepreneurs in the lab. They serve as mentors, investors, pilot sites, and first customers. In our view, the sum of all these factors creates a perfect storm for continued strong job growth for the industry.
For most of 2015, our current incubator facility in Somerville was full with a waiting list. On October 29, Greentown Labs announced an $11 million expansion to more than double in size over the next year. The plan is to retrofit an auto body repair shop next door and transform it into a 53,000 square foot facility that serves as a global center for clean technology innovation, right here in Massachusetts. At capacity, the space along with our existing lab, may accommodate as many as 100 startups. We expect to attract even more companies – and jobs – from outside New England.
From our vantage point, our prediction is that double-digit jobs growth in the clean energy sector will continue in the near term. We are excited to be a small part of that success.
Emily Reichert, CEO, Greentown Labs