Renewable Energy. Cancelled!
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Six months into the Trump Presidency and it’s fair to say that renewable energy optimism is officially waning. It seems like an eternity since the market boomed from the emergence from the pandemic, the Great Resignation, and the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act. More recently, even as our industry investments slowed with the rise of the interest rate under the Biden administration, I presumed that our needs for national energy independence and skyrocketing demand for data center power would force an agenda priority on energy, even despite the lack of respect for renewables by this new government.
Since January, as I’ve travelled to conferences and trade shows around the US, I’ve been discussing hiring budgets and marketing spend, most of which are getting cutbacks. We’re now half way into the year and renewable energy project cancellations have hit $15.5 billion! And this is without a final decision from Congress on repealing tax credits — and the latest news from the Senate isn't much cause for optimism there, either. How did we go from 90% of all new electricity coming from renewable energy in 2024 to 30 major projects cancelled in six months of 2025? It’s a shame that renewable energy is still so fragile, with its success reliant upon policy and politics instead of upon environmental concern and pragmatism.
E2 has estimated that these 30 project cancellations alone equate to a loss of 10,000 renewable energy jobs. This doesn’t include the major bankruptcies that have hit our industry over the past two years or so, in organizations like Sunnova, SunPower, ADT Solar, Meyer Burger, Mosaic, and about one hundred others. Again, not all of these companies were bankrupt as an immediate result of the Trump administration, as some decline was spurred in the interstitial Biden years—solar companies in particular struggled with the cost of capital due to the federal interest rate changes and net metering policy, particularly in California. But Climate Power estimates that, at present, 60,000 jobs have been lost or cancelled over the last six months since the election. This number represents a significant chunk of the jobs created from the IRA, and without political support on our immediate horizon, we can expect this number to continue to decline. Two steps forward - one step back.
As EnergeiaWorks’ core service is talent acquisition search, the published job losses spiked my curiosity, so I dug through the archives of our data. I almost forgot how few job-seekers there were in 2022! We measure job seekers by those who actively send their resume through our website. Since 2022, we saw a 2000% increase in resumes coming through our site, a truly staggering increase, which obviously was skewed by irregularities from the pandemic. Once The Great Resignation was over, job search leveled to normal numbers. But most notable from our data was the 45% increase in active job seekers this year compared to last year. The hardest hit area of job loss is obviously in residential solar, but we’re also seeing layoffs in larger-scale project development and solar product manufacturing.
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