The clean energy workforce shed 36,949 jobs last year, its first drop since the pandemic

The United States clean energy workforce shed 36,949 jobs in 2025, according to the business group E2, reversing four straight years of growth and leaving the sector at 3.52 million workers. It is the first annual decline since the pandemic.

Energy efficiency, renewable generation and clean vehicles all lost jobs, while storage, grid modernization and biofuels added them. California alone accounted for more than half of the net loss, and the damage reached 35 states in total.

The 2025 count and the pandemic baseline

E2’s Clean Jobs America 2026 findings memo puts the 2025 loss at 36,949 positions and calls it the sector’s first annual decline since the pandemic. The drop wiped out nearly 40 percent of the jobs created in 2024, yet clean energy employment still sits about 16 percent above its 2020 level and remains the largest employment segment in the energy economy. Adding the 2025 loss back to the 3.52 million implies a 2024 peak near 3.56 million workers, so the decline is small against the base even as it breaks a long run of gains.

Michael Timberlake, E2’s director of research, said, as quoted by IndexBox, that “America’s clean energy jobs boom did not merely slow in 2025 but reversed.” Before the turn, the sector had added roughly 100,000 jobs a year for four consecutive years, which is why a net loss of under 37,000 registers as a reversal and not a rounding error in the series.

Efficiency, renewables and vehicles lose jobs; storage and grid gain

The sector breakdown reported by Mercom India shows where the loss concentrated. Energy efficiency shed 21,443 jobs, renewable generation 11,584 and clean vehicles 9,619. Storage and grid modernization added 5,346 and biofuels 350, which offset only a fraction of the declines: the three shrinking segments lost 42,646 jobs between them, against 5,696 gained. Efficiency, the single largest piece of the clean energy workforce, accounts for close to 58 percent of the net loss. In percentage terms, clean vehicles fell the most, at 2.4 percent, against 2.0 percent for renewable generation and 0.9 percent for efficiency.

Electrek’s account of the analysis describes the same split: declines in efficiency, renewables and electric vehicles, gains in battery storage, grid and biofuels. Storage and grid work is the one place in the data where hiring accelerated while the rest of the sector contracted.

California, Florida and the project cancellations

California lost 20,655 clean energy jobs, a 3.7 percent decline and the largest of any state. Illinois lost 2,958, Maryland 2,395, Massachusetts 2,212 and Michigan 1,926. California’s loss equals about 56 percent of the national net figure. Florida went the other way with 3,801 added jobs, a 2.1 percent gain, ahead of Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico and Idaho. New Mexico’s 754-job gain was the biggest in percentage terms, at 5.4 percent.

E2 ties the reversal to federal policy changes that began in January 2025 under the Trump administration and Congress, covering support for clean energy and electric vehicles. Its project tracker recorded 142 clean energy projects canceled or downsized during the year, representing $57.8 billion in planned investment and about 84,400 projected jobs. That projected total is roughly 2.3 times the net 2025 loss, though jobs promised by a cancelled project and jobs actually shed are different measures, and the tracker’s total does not map one-to-one onto the DOE-based employment count. Bob Keefe, E2’s executive director, said the numbers “clearly show the consequences of a year marked by project cancellations,” per IndexBox’s report.

Department of Energy data and BW Research behind the count

The figures rest on Department of Energy employment data, compiled with BW Research Partnership for the 2026 U.S. Energy and Employment Report, which the department’s Office of Policy publishes at national, state and county level. E2 supplied the clean-energy cut of that data, which is why Electrek describes the result as an E2 analysis of Energy Department employment figures and not a new federal tally.

The loss also sits inside a wider downturn. RTO Insider carried E2’s finding that clean energy jobs shrank by nearly 37,000 in 2025, and E2 puts the whole U.S. energy sector’s loss that year at about 86,000 jobs, with clean energy accounting for roughly 43 percent of it. Oil and gas employs about 958,000 people, coal 125,000 and nuclear 70,000, against the 3.52 million in clean energy. E2 has said its full Clean Jobs America report is due in October 2026, when the sector and state tables behind the memo’s headline numbers are expected to be published in full and can be checked against the Energy Department’s own state-level releases.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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