A Path Towards Low-Carbon Workforce Development: Key Takeaways from EESI’s Workforce Wednesdays Briefing Series

October 9, 2020

EESI’s September Workforce Wednesdays briefing series featured seventeen experts and practitioners from around the country, along with two members of Congress, to discuss policies and programs working to develop a low-carbon workforce. Topic areas included high school career and technical education, conservation corps, energy transitions in coal country, industry and innovation, and small businesses. Recurring themes such as youth engagement, win-win economic and environmental solutions, emerging technologies, and rural challenges helped create a holistic characterization of pressing workforce needs and opportunities.

Career and Technical Education (CTE)

While high school career and technical education was the focus of the first briefing in the Workforce Wednesdays, the topic remained a conversational touchstone throughout the series. About 33 percent of high school graduates do not go on to pursue a college degree. For those that do, nearly half of first time bachelor’s students do not earn their degrees within six years; these students can end up with huge student loan debt burdens yet little academic credentials to show for their time and money.

CTE in high school can mitigate these issues by introducing students to potential careers and secondary education opportunities, focusing studies and giving students a clearer idea of what they’d like to do. CTE programs can also partner with private businesses and public research institutions to be more responsive to local workforce needs and trends. Currently most high schools focus on college preparation, with limited options for CTE, especially in the sustainability or renewable energy fields.

EESI’s briefing and expert interviews showed programs bucking the trend. Kansas Olathe West High School’s Green Tech Academy is open to all students in the Olathe public school district. The STEM- and engineering-focused curriculum was developed in partnership with a local utility and other local and national companies to create a pipeline to the clean energy workforce. Students take classes in either clean energy or sustainability tracks. In their sophomore year they compete in the KidWind competition, and in their senior year they complete a capstone project on a clean energy issue.

Ocean Springs High School, Mississippi, takes a different approach to CTE, focusing on marine biology and aquaculture, an important industry in the Gulf Coast. Students raise, release, and cook different aquatic species. Students are additionally involved in ecosystem data collection in partnership with the University of Southern Mississippi and the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources. Teacher Bryan Butler noted that his students have gone into salmon research, started horticulture companies, and grown their own food using aquaponics to sell to grocery stores and markets.

Conservation Corps

Conservation Corps, originally created during the Great Depression to address simultaneous environmental and workforce concerns, exist through a wide variety of government and non-profit organizations throughout the country. Corps members participate in projects in both wilderness and urban settings, creating trails, preserving wildlands or historic sites, improving building energy efficiency, or creating urban gardens. Some programs, such as the California Conservation Corps, offer these programs alongside opportunities to earn a high school diploma, preparing young folks for the workforce and college in a similar way to the previously highlighted CTE programs.

EESI’s Conservation Corps briefing highlighted the diversity of modern corps programs. Conservation Legacy’s Ancestral Lands Program was created in 2008 to engage Native youth, who traditionally faced barriers to accessing conservation corps programs. Ancestral Lands incorporates cultural components into its activities, teaching the cultural significance of the lands the corps work on and offering a farm corps, where members can learn traditional agricultural practices.

Green City Force in New York City recruits urban young people to work primarily on projects in the public housing sector in partnership with the New York City Housing Authority. Corps members conduct home energy audits and energy efficiency or renewable energy retrofits. This service experience is designed to lead directly to employment opportunities or college enrollment; GCF currently boasts an 80 percent graduate job placement rate.

The third program presented, Green Forests Work, is intended to provide immediate job opportunities and long-term economic growth to Appalachian communities harmed by the environmental impacts of abandoned mines. GFW works on ecological restoration projects with conservation corps like Conservation Legacy and hires local contractors, including former miners. Restoring forests both improves environmental quality and the health of local communities and opens opportunities to engage in forest-based industries.

Energy Transitions in Coal Country

Like Appalachia, communities in Western coal states struggle with the environmental impacts of mines and the economic impacts of mine closures. Experts in this briefing highlighted the unique history and challenges facing these communities. Remote mining communities are particularly vulnerable to mine closures as other economic opportunities are limited in these areas. This leaves workers with the hard choice of moving or experiencing high rates of poverty. Current financial configurations of coal profit revenue sharing have distorted local economies such that economic growth and diversification outside the coal economy creates budget gaps, deepening fiscal crises.

Without a national strategy for coal transition, states are taking different approaches to coal plant closures. States like Washington, Colorado, and New Mexico are attempting to accelerate the energy transition while Wyoming and Montana are trying to slow it down and keep coal plants open. Current federal programs such as the Department of Labor’s Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) initiative and Assistance to Coal Communities (ACC) Program are insufficient to address the needs of remote communities.

Tribes are particularly vulnerable because community members are more constrained by the boundaries of their reservations. Members of the Apsaalooke Nation, John Doyle and Charlene Johnson, described the difficulties their community faces. When coal mines closed, 1,000 people lost their jobs. The lack of revenue from coal has caused severe infrastructure challenges, which the tribes are not able to collect funds to address. Plumbers and HVAC service engineers are in high demand, but tribal educational and training resources are limited due to lack of funds.

Industry and Innovation: Mass Timber

The forest products industry is a promising sector with the potential to provide new economic opportunities in construction, manufacturing, and natural resources management across the country. A recent report estimates there are 775,000 jobs and $46 billion currently tied to the industry, with 515 sawmills in 470 mostly rural communities across 32 states. Mass timber is a particularly innovative wood product that provides carbon storage and can serve as a substitute for high-carbon building materials such as concrete and steel.

Representatives from two mass timber companies discussed the industry’s current and potential challenges. Freres Lumber Co., Inc. invested $40 million in research and development to create the Mass Plywood Panel, a veneer wood product that can use thin logs that could otherwise be fuel for wildfires. Freres Lumber currently employs 430 full time employees and has gross annual sale revenues of $150 million. The key barriers to growth for the company include access to lumber, workforce, and competing wood products from overseas. Increasing access to federal and state managed forest lands by updating 20-year stewardship contracts would be a key next step in eliminating some of those concerns and moving the industry forward in the U.S.

Sterling Solutions, a cross-laminated timber mat manufacturing company, has grown from 112 to 530 employees since 2014. New Sterling manufacturing plants are located in formerly successful manufacturing towns of Phoenix, Illinois, and Lufkin, Texas. To develop their local workforce, Sterling engages with high schools and community colleges to advertise opportunities in the mass timber industry, along with offering an educational program called Sterling University, which teaches life skills and English as a second language courses.

After mass timber products are created, there are additional hurdles to using them in building construction. WoodWorks, a nonprofit, provides construction workers a tool to estimate costs and assess how an overall project will function, reducing risks associated with trying these relatively new products. There have been 921 mass timber construction projects initiated in the United States to date, of which 384 have been built and 537 are in the design stage. And there is potential for much more--WoodWorks estimates 17,000 buildings annually could use mass timber elements.

Small Business

Freres Lumber and Sterling Solutions were each family-owned businesses that have proven to be vehicles of innovation and economic opportunity for their local communities. EESI’s final briefing highlighted three other small businesses and the workforce opportunities small businesses provide.

The energy efficiency sector has been particularly hard hit by COVID-19; 345,000 jobs were lost since March. Leticia Colon de Mejias, owner of Energy Efficiencies Solutions, noted that her company currently employs 22 people and has trained over 120 people in energy efficiency skills. Energy efficiency careers can provide substantial emissions savings and provide local workforce opportunities that cannot be offshored, but finding appropriate workers remains a challenge. Colon de Mejias suggested the Bureauof Labor update codes to better recognize the careers and benefits energy efficiency can offer, and provide additional funding resources for training programs.

The other two companies represented on the panel, Ocean Renewable Power Company (ORPC), and Azavea, discussed how federal grants for innovation help create jobs and improve efficiency in the renewable energy and geospatial data visualization space, respectively. Azavea developed ten new products with support from awards from the Small Business Innovation and Research grant program, coordinated by the Small Business Administration. These products have been used to assist municipalities and other organizations in developing climate risk management plans at a lower cost than hiring full-time GIS professionals.

Similarly, ORPC has received innovation grants from multiple federal agencies to design, build, and launch hydrokinetic energy devices. Some of ORPC’s most recent work is with the remote Alaskan village of Igiugig, where ORPC’s technology was able to replace diesel fuel generation and provide locals with maintenance and installation jobs. Such success could be replicated in other remote areas dependent on diesel generation.

Author: Amber Todoroff