Sustainable Energy Is Bringing High-Paying Jobs to Rural Areas

Though electric vehicles make up just 1% of registered cars on the road, drivers bought 1.2 million of them last year. As more of the automotive fleet transitions to EVs, we’re just going to need more electricity. A good portion of that may come from sustainable sources, such as wind and solar. And as a bonus, these energy sources will bring jobs to rural areas.

Here’s an example: In the Invenergy company which puts up wind turbines had 200 U.S. technicians in 2022, and doubled to 400 technicians in 2023. This year, its hiring hundreds more. And that’s just one company. This industry is absolutely booming.

Benjamin Sussman is a college student learning how to maintain wind turbines. Why? Because he knows it is going to be big business on the plains of rural, eastern Colorado where he grew up. He said after college, “I’m hoping to go straight into the wind industry.” He doesn’t mind heights and loves how the career combines working with electricity and mechanics. It doesn’t hurt that the average wind turbine tech makes over $60k a year.

His teacher, Jason Winter, said of students in the area, “If they don’t have a family farm to work on, they really don’t have a lot of opportunity…Now, when we have all of a sudden really good-paying jobs, it makes sense to stay here. I think that’s huge for the community.”

The solar industry is seeing as big a boom. In 2023 alone, 800,000 homeowners decided to put panels on their roofs. Industry experts predict we’ll have solar panels on 100 million homes by 2034. And of course they hired local technicians to install them. And that’s just private installations.

Solar farms are growing too. In 2023, the amount of energy created by solar went up by a whopping 51%. In just one year it installed 32.4 gigawatts of solar energy capacity. That’s over half the added grid capacity, of any energy source. To put that into perspective, it can take three million panels to produce just one gigawatt.

One benefit of green energy is that we produce it here, in rural communities in the U.S. And that means much needed jobs for the folks who live here. Sounds like a win-win.