The challenges of determining the employment effects of renewable energy

By R. Lambert, P. P. Silva. 2012

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The benefits of promoting renewable energy are regularly claimed to be energy security, climate change mitigation and job creation. While the first two benefits are generally accepted, the impact of renewable energy on employment is still disputed. This paper presents a discussion of the various factors that influence the analysis of renewable energy and its impact on employment. The advantages and disadvantages of input–output methods and analysis methods are discussed as well as the issues surrounding the measurement of job creation. A critical evaluation of the literature reveals factors that should be considered when completing a study about renewable energy and employment: labour intensity of renewables; cost increases and availability of investments; counting job losses; job quality and skills, model assumptions and sources of information. Analytical studies using extensive surveys were found to be more appropriate for regional studies while input–output methods were better suited to national and international studies.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Pollution, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fac12038f8667b942ff82437c202fd200791c2ca

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

1. Yuan Liu
2. Y. Mu
3. D. Roland-Holst
4. Heidi Garrett-Peltier
5. Moana S. Simas
6. Can Wang
7. S. Evans
8. W. Cai

In Pollution

1. Heidi Garrett-Peltier
2. Moana S. Simas
3. Can Wang
4. Yuan Liu
5. Hongtao Yi
6. S. Pacca

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Yuan Liu
2. Heidi Garrett-Peltier
3. Moana S. Simas
4. Can Wang
5. Hongtao Yi
6. S. Pacca

Citations in the corpus

• Green economy in China: Regional variations and policy drivers (2015, background): “In the current literature, there are two major approaches to green jobs study: input–output models and analytical models (Lambert and Silva, 2012).”
• Green versus brown: Comparing the employment impacts of energy efficiency, renewable energy, and fossil fuels using an input-output model (2017, background): “While the peer-reviewed literature is still limited and the impacts on employment are sometimes noted as being disputed (Lambert and Silva, 2012), a number of researchers using input-output modeling have found positive employment impacts resulting from the growth of renewable energy industries…”
• Employment impacts of renewable energy policies in China: A decomposition analysis based on a CGE modeling framework (2018, methodology): “Currently, there are three primary approaches to study the employment impacts of renewable energy policies [5,6]: (1) computable general equilibrium (CGE) methods; (2) input-output (I/O) methods; and (3) analytical methods, which generally rely on extensive surveys and focus on a speci fi c…”
• Economic Effects of Renewable Energy Expansion: A Model-Based Analysis for Germany (2014, unknown): “A number of important factors determining employment outcomes of such model analyses have been suggested by Lambert and Silva (2012), among them different assumptions on the labour intensity of renewables and cost developments.”
• Assessing employment in renewable energy technologies: A case study for wind power in Brazil (2014, methodology): “Usually, methods used to determine the potential of jobs created by RET rely on input-output methods, analytical methods or a combination of both [9–11].”