Electrification workforce could dwarf number needed for renewables – but will they be ready? 

Facing a perfect storm of climate related temperature rise, cost of living pressures and increased climate-awareness, consumers may be thinking about making some electrification or energy efficiency improvements to their home or business. 

Upgrades include things like insulation, double-glazed windows and fast EV chargers but also extend to more complex engineering of industrial processes. Whether the expertise will be available when it’s needed is an open question.

Electrification and energy efficiency activities require a skilled and knowledgeable workforce with occupations like electricians, air-conditioning technicians, insulation installers, energy assessors/auditors and many more. 

We are currently seeing the impacts of not investing or planning for workforce development. A wide range of infrastructure projects have been cancelled or postponed because there is not the capacity to build them, but demand continues to exceed supply.

Skills shortages in key occupations could also increase the cost or slow the pace of electrification. Jobs and Skills Australia has projected a shortage of as many as 60,000 electricians for example.  

However, currently, we don’t have good data on the size of the demand-side workforce – the workers required for electrification, installing energy efficient technologies and managing energy. 

These workers are distributed throughout the economy, so they are not as visible as the ‘supply-side’ workforce required to build our solar, wind and transmission lines – they are the hidden energy workforce. 

UTS ISF and Climate Works have developed a method to predict the demand side workforce needed from the standard energy scenarios used by planning groups in Australia. The ‘demand-side’ workforce may dwarf the supply-side workforce. 

Initial calculations in our pilot project put the workforce as two to three times higher (or more) compared to the workforce for electricity generation and storage.

However, these projections need to be verified through industry surveys and extended to provide much needed detail on the occupations in highest demand across the huge variety of situations where efficiency and electrification works are needed. 

Occupational projections are required so training bodies understand the future demand. Coordinated funding from the sectors who will benefit from workforce insights is required to make this work happen. 

At a time when the labour market is already experiencing critical shortages, it is essential to plan for the increase in workforce demand, particularly for occupations with a high risk of shortages, like electricians. 

This could be a significant opportunity for a young or transitioning workforce looking for a future-proof career, hungry for building a better future for Australia.

But without a detailed understanding of exactly how many workers will be needed and when, training organisations and current and future workers are left in the dark about how to prepare.

Rusty Langdon is a senior research consultant at Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney. Jay Rutovitz and Chris Briggs are research directors at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney.