Renewable energy employment in Australia

摘要: Jobs in renewable energy have emerged as a key issue for energy transition. For the renewable energy industry, skill and labour shortages have been a recurrent problem as the industry has swung through ‘boom-bust’cycles; local workforce gaps lead companies to use ‘coping strategies’(eg offshore recruitment which reduces local employment) and increases project costs from competition for specialists. For local communities, there are questions about how many jobs renewable energy will create as traditional energy sources decline, the types of jobs and where they will be located. In particular, regions which rely upon coal mining and power generation are rightly anxious about whether existing jobs will be adequately replaced.Currently, there is limited information on the volume, location and type of jobs in renewable energy in Australia. The international classification frameworks, used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and other national statistical agencies, measure employment within coal mining and fossil fuel power generation but not renewable energy (which is grouped as ‘other electricity generation’). 5 The ABS publishes an annual estimate of employment in renewable energy based on secondary sources (eg a literature review of employment factors) but does not collect survey data on renewable energy jobs. Consequently, there is an absence of robust Australian data on jobs in renewable energy.