2019 U.S. Energy and Employment Report

The 2019 U.S. Energy & Employment Report (USEER) (March 2019) was the fourth installment of the survey and the second report co-produced by the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) and the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO). It provided an in-depth survey of the U.S. labor force and skills trends in five energy sectors across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The 2019 USEER finds that the traditional energy and energy efficiency sectors employed approximately 6.7 million Americans, or 4.6 percent of a workforce of roughly 147 million. Employment in these sectors increased by 2.3 percent from the previous year, adding 151,700 net new jobs, or nearly 7 percent of all new jobs nationwide. The report was prefaced by a bipartisan forward authored by Governor Ned Lamont (Democrat of Connecticut), and Governor Gary Herbert (Republican of Utah).

Established in 2016, the USEER tracks employment trends in fuels; electric power generation; transmission, distribution, and storage; energy efficiency; and motor vehicles. The USEER is based on supplemental surveys of approximately 30,000 employers, and it enriches the employment data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages. The data was collected by BW Research Partnership, a research consultancy that has conducted employer surveys for all editions of the USEER. 

This report includes detailed data for the 53 separate technologies that comprise the five surveyed sectors. Each of these technologies is, in turn, divided into as many as seven industrial classifications. As a result, the USEER data base provides an in-depth view of the hiring difficulty, in-demand occupations, and demographic composition of very specific portions of the energy and energy efficiency workforce in each state or in specific counties and, in some cases, portions of counties.

The 2019 USEER was presented in March 2019 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The event, convened by David Ellis, EFI’s Vice President of Communications and Policy Strategy, featured a panel of energy experts, led by former Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, President & CEO of EFI, and David Terry, the Executive Director of NASEO. 

The full USEER, Executive Summary, State Fact Sheets, and a recorded webinar with key takeaways from the report were originally published on www.USenergyjobs.org. In 2021, the USEER was published by the Biden Administration’s Department of Energy under a congressional mandate for it to return as a government-issued report.

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