 Eastleigh Borough/Creative CommonsTHE FACTS Demand and government funding for renewables, electric-vehicle batteries, and other clean energy technologies are surging. But companies driving the energy transition are running into a new impediment to scaling up: Finding enough workers. With U.S. unemployment near its lowest level in 70 years, the country’s labor pool is already stretched thin. But the climate workforce is especially tight. An analysis of LinkedIn job-posting data this week found that positions labeled “green” are the fastest-growing hiring category, and that demand for those openings is exceeding the supply of candidates with relevant skills by a widening margin. The Inflation Reduction Act is projected to create an additional 1.5 million wind and solar jobs by 2035, meaning the size of those workforces needs to roughly triple in the next decade. Hiring is already a major challenge for 89% of U.S. solar companies, a survey last year found. Battery factories and mineral mines are also struggling to hire sufficient skilled workers. “The labor market is extremely competitive,” Jon Evans, CEO of the mining company Lithium Americas, told Semafor. TIM’S VIEW The workforce shortage is especially dire in the mining sector, as the U.S. scrambles to shore up supplies of lithium and other minerals for batteries and renewables hardware. Easing the bottleneck starts in college with training workers, so there’s no quick fix, and no time to waste in readying the next generation of mineral engineers. By 2030, half of the current U.S. mining workforce — about 221,000 workers — is expected to retire and will need to be replaced, not to mention the workers needed for new lithium mines in Nevada and elsewhere. Yet the country’s 14 university-level mining engineering programs saw their combined body of graduates drop by half in the last five years, to a paltry 172 graduates this year, said Steve Enders, a professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “There’s clearly a war for talent at all levels,” he said. The problem, he said, is that most incoming college students associate “mining” with coal and see it more as a contribution to climate change than part of the solution to it. Young engineering students also see mining as low-tech compared to computer science and other engineering fields when in fact, Enders said, the mining jobs that are most in demand are increasingly high-tech and focused on automation and machine learning. A talent war is good for the few graduates that are looking for mining careers: Enders said most have at least four job offers by their final semester and a starting salary above $75,000. But that competition is also a factor driving up the prices of lithium, copper, and other minerals. ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT In some cases, the deficit of workers may be the result of inadequate compensation, rather than a shortage of hands. In spite of the IRA’s preferential tax benefits for companies that adhere to high labor standards, many clean energy project developers are still reluctant to use unionized electricians and other construction workers, and will need to offer more competitive compensation to staff up, said Jason Shedlock, president of the Maine State Building and Construction Trades Council, a group of unions: “Developers will still try to get as much as they can for as little as they can. But they’re finding that workers across the country aren’t buying it anymore. They can’t find workers for the wages they’re willing to offer.” To read the view from China and the rest of this story, click here. | 
