2020 U.S. Energy and Employment Report

The 2020 U.S. Energy & Employment Report (USEER) (March 2020) was the third installment of the survey as co-produced by the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) and the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO). It was the fifth annual 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 survey found that the U.S. energy sector employed 6.8 million workers—an increase of 120,300 new jobs from the previous year. 

Established in 2016, the USEER tracks employment trends in fuels; electric power generation; transmission, distribution, and storage; energy efficiency; and motor vehicles. EFI and NASEO, which represents the 56 governor-designated State and Territory energy officials, began producing the USEER in 2018. 

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 USEER was to be presented in March 2020 by EFI founder Ernest J. Moniz at the National Press Club, along with a keynote address by the then-Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette, but the event was canceled due to COVID-19 health precautions.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.