CETI hosted a webinar on April 18, 2024 to share the findings from our Net-Zero Northwest Workforce State Analysis, which we released 9 days earlier. The study is the Northwest’s first comprehensive clean energy workforce analysis that examines the jobs to be created or displaced by occupation and industry in the buildings, fuels, electricity, and transportation sectors in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington if the region were to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. 

This blog offers a recap of the webinar. A recording is also available.

Grounding: CETI and Net-Zero Northwest

The event began with Executive Director Eileen V. Quigley giving background on CETI and the Net-Zero Northwest: Technical and Economic Pathways to 2050 (NZNW), an economy-wide deep decarbonization pathways analysis that examines the energy, health, and workforce impacts if the Northwest were to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and that provided the input data for this employment analysis.

Getting into the State-Specific Data by Sector

Ruby Moore-Bloom then walked through highlights of the state-specific workforce results for each of the four sectors examined, with a focus on near-term employment impacts on the path to net-zero:

Buildings: By 2030, all Northwest states experience employment growth ranging from 21%-27%. All Buildings subsectors see increasing job demand as energy efficiency and building electrification and decarbonization efforts ramp up.

Transportation: By 2030, Transportation employment decreases slightly in Oregon and Montana and increases slightly in Idaho and Washington. These changes reflect the complexity of the vehicle stock transition. There is projected job growth when large numbers of both internal combustion engine vehicles and electric vehicles are on the road, but job decline as electric vehicles (which require less maintenance), take over and supplant the need for conventional fueling stations

Electricity: Using clean electricity to decarbonize as many sectors as possible is key to a low-carbon future. As renewables emerge as sources of electricity generation, fossil fuel generation subsectors experience net decreases in employment. At the same time, there is significantly more growth in renewable electricity capacity and related activities to meet growing demand for electricity, leading to considerable net growth in Electricity sector workforce in all four states.

While all Northwest states experience net growth, Montana’s high-capacity factor wind resources contribute to the state’s Electricity workforce more than doubling by 2030, largely with jobs supporting Land-Based Wind, Distribution, and Transmission subsectors.

Fuels: Unlike many parts of the country, projected job growth in clean fuel subsectors (Hydrogen and Biofuels) outpaces losses in fossil fuel subsectors by 2030 in Idaho, Montana, and Washington. While the NZNW Energy Pathways analysis found that most production of hydrogen and hydrogen-derived fuels occurs in Montana due to the state’s high-quality wind resources, Idaho and Washington also experience net job growth in the Fuels sector resulting from the need for early clean fuels development in theNorthwest.

The NZNW Energy Pathways-Clean Fuels analysis showed clean fuels developing later in Oregon than the rest of the Northwest, and while Oregon’s Hydrogen and Biofuels jobs grow along with the other states, this growth is not projected to offset decreases in the state’s fossil fuel subsector jobs by 2030.

Visualizing the Results with Interactive Figures

Ruby also demonstrated how to interact with the visualizations on the NZNW Workforce website and where to access full results materials for each state. Each page in the Workforce section of the site has visualizations with interactive tools that allow you to filter data by modeled year, subsector, industry, occupation, wage, and geographic area - with options to view data by state or the Northwest region as a whole.

Each sector page (Electricity, Fuels, Buildings, Transportation) offers five core figures:

• Subsector Descriptions and Example Jobs: A table that provides context for the subsectors and jobs that make up each sector.
• Northwest Baseline Employment & Job Growth Loss by Subsector: For each sector, this figure shows the baseline employment in 2021 and the growth or loss experienced in 2025, 2030, and 2035 by subsector. It can be filtered by year and geographic region.
• Northwest Sector Jobs by Industry Category: A pie chart shows the proportion of jobs in each industry category examined for a given sector from 2021-2040 and can be filtered by year, subsector, and geographic region.
• Northwest Sector Jobs by Occupation: For each sector, this graph shows the change in employment from 2021 to 2030 by occupation, including net growth or loss and can be filtered by geographic region.
• Northwest Sector Jobs by Wage Tier: This bar chart compares the percentage of jobs in three different wage tiers between 2021 and 2030 for each sector and can be filtered by geographic region.

Answering Your Questions

Before the webinar came to a close, we answered several audience questions about the analysis with help from CETI Research Fellow Claire Buysse and BW Research Partnership Research Director Mitchell Schirch.

In Case You Missed It, Some Resources

If you couldn't join us live, here are some resources for you to explore:

• Slide Deck, Webinar Recording, and Webinar Q&A
• NZNW Workforce State Analysis Key Findings

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