Employment

In recent years, the amount of wind energy capacity installed in the EU has shot up. Between 2000 and 2009, capacity increased almost six fold, reaching a total of over 75 GW by the end of the nine year period and providing 4% of EU electricity. It is impossible to manufacture, build, install and maintain wind turbines without people. It is equally impossible to plan, gain permits for and supervise a wind farm without them. Unsurprisingly then, employment related to wind energy has also gone up strikingly in recent years.


Wind energy employed 192,00 people in 2009

In 2009, the wind energy industry employed 192,000 people directly or indirectly in Europe, from which 19,000 worked for the offshore sector. Assuming EWEA’s targets are met (i.e. cumulative installed capacity of 230 GW in 2020, including 40 GW offshore), the wind energy sector will employ 182,000 people in 2010, 282,000 in 2015 and 446,000 by 2020. By 2025, employment in the European offshore wind sector is expected to exceed onshore wind energy employment. By 2030, wind energy will employ 479,000 people in the EU, of which 294,000 – 61% of the total – will be in offshore wind energy. A previous EWEA study on EU-15 employment found that wind energy directly employed 48,363 people in 2002 (EWEA, 2003).

 

On average, 10,503 new direct wind energy jobs have been created per year in the five-year period 2002-2008. In other words, 29 new people have been employed every day, seven days a week in the wind energy sector over the past six years. Wind turbine and component manufacturers are responsible for the lion’s share of direct wind energy employment (59%), as can be seen from Figure below. 

 

In addition to direct employment, the wind energy sector also affects employment in sectors not directly related to wind energy. From Table below it can be seen that wind turbine and component manufacturing employed some 64,000 directly and 43,000 indirectly in 2007. Keeping the same assumptions, this number raised to 65,717 direct jobs and 43,811 indirect jobs in 2008.

In 2008, wind farm development, installation, operations and maintenance (O&M) employed 30,000 directly and an additional 16,000 were employed directly in other wind energy related jobs.

 

From table below it can be seen that 15.1 jobs are created in the EU for every MW installed. In addition, 0.4 jobs are created per MW of cumulative capacity in operations and maintenance and other activities. These figures do not take into account the higher employment effect of installing, operating and maintaining offshore wind turbines.

 

75% of direct employment in Germany, Denmark and Spain

The three wind energy ‘pioneers’ – Denmark, Germany and Spain – were the first countries to realise the vast potential of the winds sweeping across their lands and to begin installing signifi cant amounts of wind energy capacity. Although other EU Member States are now catching up, three-quarters of the jobs in the sector are still to be found in the three pioneer countries, and certain regions that are especially advanced in wind energy installation have an even higher than average concentration of jobs.

Entire local communities have been revitalised as a consequence of wind turbine manufacturing and related activities. There are many examples of this from the three pioneering countries.

Cities such as Nakskov and Esbjerg in Denmark; the region of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany and the region of Navarre in Spain are all examples of areas where the wind energy sector continues to have a dramatic impact on the local economies and overall employment.

Shortage of skilled workers

In the last two to three years, wind energy companies have repeatedly reported an acute shortage of workers within certain fields. The general pressure on human resources, resulting from strong economic growth, is reinforced by the extraordinary performance of the sector itself since the end of the 1990s. From 2000 to 2008, wind energy installations in the EU increased by 400%. This has led to a multiplication of job offers in all the sub-sectors, especially in manufacturing and development activities.

- Manufacturers report a shortage in two types of jobs: firstly, engineers and secondly, O&M and site management activities.

- Wind energy promoters need more project managers – the professionals responsible for getting the permits in the country where the wind farm is going to be installed. The position requires a rare combination of a specific knowledge of the country in question, wind energy expertise and negotiating skills.

- Other profiles, such as financiers or sales managers can occasionally be hard to find, but in general are less of a problem for wind energy companies, maybe because the qualifications that they require are less specialised.

- For R&D institutes the picture is not clear: of the two consulted, one did not report any problems, while the other is suffering from a lack of experienced researchers. It is worth noting that the remuneration offered by R&D centres is often below the levels offered by private companies.

The wind energy sector is facing a serious shortage of candidates to fill the existing and future job vacancies. This is particularly true of the positions that require more years of study and experience to fill: engineers, operations and maintenance technicians and site managers, to name but three. In order to tackle these shortages, information on careers in the sector needs to be distributed at secondary school, before students decide which courses to take, and by employment offices and training centres. Another issue – the disparity between the skills required to go into the sector in the different Member States – should be ironed out, perhaps by the creation of an EU-wide diploma.

In its Lisbon strategy, recently reemphasized through the Europe 2020 strategy, the European Commission favors the mobility of researchers through a concept called the "European Research Area". This concept, however, should not apply only to researchers, but be extended to the entire wind sector. Since the wind industry is international, and considering the scarcity of relevant skills on the European market, the workforce mobility in the wind sector will increase. It requires a common framework for skills assessment in the EU.