Green energy skills shortage on horizon, warn engineers

The AEE is set to predict a serious shortage of green energy skills

The US stimulus package is due to create hundreds of thousands of green jobs, but one engineering industry association is fearful that many projects could struggle to fill them.

In a survey to be published in the next two weeks, the Association of Energy Engineers (AEE) will predict a serious shortage of green energy skills due to a lack of training and an aging base of energy professionals.

The AEE, which says all its members work in the energy efficiency or renewable energy sector, predicts one in four of its members will retire over the next 10 years.

Almost three quarters of the 962 respondents, representing about 10 per cent of the Association's membership, said they believe there will be a shortage of qualified professionals in the energy efficiency and renewable energy fields in the next five years, and 70 per cent said that there needs to be a national and state training programme for green jobs to address the potential shortfall.

Albert Thumann, executive director of the AEE, argued that while it was relatively easy to see how many energy engineers would leave the profession in the next decade, it was harder to predict how many would enter it because most universities turned out "vanilla" engineers with no specific energy engineering training. Much of the training to specialise in that area had to be carried out on the job, he warned.

"Electrical engineering curricula have been around for a hundred years or more," said Thumann, who blamed undergraduate courses for particularly slow deployment of professional energy engineering programmes. "If we take professional energy engineering, that has been around for 30 years at most. Universities have been very slow at getting on the bandwagon because they are not always in the entrepreneurial category."

Critics might note that the survey base consists entirely of energy professionals, who would naturally like to see more jobs for their kind, while it is unclear just how many of the respondents are in a human resources or hiring capacity with a finger on the administrative pulse.

However, some experts have long-standing concerns that while many of the jobs created in renewable and energy efficiency industries will be relatively easy to fill with professionals from the ailing construction sector, it will be much harder to fill more specialist engineering and scientific roles.

The Alliance to Save Energy has estimated that the stimulus package could create more than 100,000 jobs in renewable energy and energy efficiency, while the Solar Energy Industry Association is expecting 119,000 jobs in the solar sector alone over the next two years.