The transition to clean energy represents a fundamental and important shift in economic activity. We present new facts about workers in clean and legacy energy sectors between 2005 and 2019 using linked, administrative employer-employee data for all W-2 workers in the United States. We show that both clean and legacy energy establishments hire a disproportionate share of non-Hispanic White and male workers compared to the working population, that workers rarely move from legacy to clean firms, and that, conditional on education, workers do not earn more in clean firms than in legacy firms. The occupational categories of jobs at clean firms differ notably from occupations at legacy firms and, on average, tend to be performed by workers with higher levels of education. Regional overlap in employment opportunities is not sufficient to facilitate worker transitions from legacy to clean firms. Substantially lower earnings outside of the energy sector combined with low mobility between legacy and clean firms suggests that the costs of the clean transition on workers in legacy fossil fuel sectors may be substantial. At the same time workers moving into clean activities from outside of the energy sector experience significant increases in earnings and greater job stability, suggesting that clean jobs are "good jobs" for those who can access them.

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9 October 2025     Paper Number CEPDP2127

Download PDF - Nice work if you can get it? The distribution of employment and earnings during the early years of the clean energy transition

This CEP discussion paper is published under the centre's Green Transition programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Green technology adoption and diffusion