ENERGY EFFICIENCY EMPLOYMENT IN AUSTRALIA
Energy efficiency has played a key role in improving Australians’ wealth, health and wellbeing. More efficient businesses are more productive, and more efficient homes are cooler in summer, warmer in winter, healthier and cheaper to run. Improving the energy efficiency of Australian homes and businesses is the largest opportunity we have to reduce households’ energy bills.
To date, very little work has been undertaken to estimate the number of people employed in energy efficiency in Australia. The Energy Efficiency Council and the Energy Savings Industry Association commissioned Green Energy Markets to estimate:
- Upper and lower bound estimates of the number of people currently working in energy efficiency activities in Australia. The estimates of current employment figures are based on a range of existing sources of information; and
- The employment that would be created by government policies that drive the adoption of a series of technologically mature energy efficiency upgrades to homes and businesses.
Green Energy Markets’ analysis suggested that there are large numbers of current workers in energy efficiency – in fact there are more FTE in energy efficiency than any other part of the energy sector. This scale of employment makes common sense – Australia has tens of millions of buildings and units of energy-using equipment, and a large workforce is required to build, use and maintain these assets. Green Energy Markets also found that, if Australian governments were to adopt policies aimed as accelerating energy efficiency improvement of this large number of assets, it would generate significant levels of employment.
Our energy efficiency workforce has been hiding in plain sight. This report shines a light into a major part of our economy that is worthy of far more attention.
Read the full report
Read the executive summary
