Around 100 students are expected to enroll this year in EDGE (Educating and Developing Workers for the Green Economy), a public-private partnership that offers industrial and technical certificate programs in biofuels and biotech production, analysis and processing.
EDGE’s first certificate course began in March at MiraCosta community college in northern San Diego County, and a second set of students will start classes this summer. Tuition will be waved the first two years as the program is tweaked, and course materials will later be packaged for nationwide distribution. A Masters of Advanced Science will be offered next year through the University of California, San Diego for biotech entrepreneurs.
The one-year-old EcoTech Institute near Denver, which earlier this month unveiled a new $10 million flagship campus that will host up to 1,200 students. Some 250 students have been enrolled since last July in two-year associate’s degree programs for wind and solar energy technology, electrical engineering technology, energy efficiency, environmental technology and general renewable energy training.
Where California and Colorado are readying employees for whole new professions, Nevada is looking to recruit new talent and update skills of mature workers for its decades-old geothermal industry. This summer, the National Geothermal Academy will offer its first set of eight weeklong courses on geothermal energy development and utilization at the University of Nevada, Reno.
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As a new study from McKinsey points out, the clean-energy industry doesn’t have much in common with old, labor-intensive manufacturing industries like steel and cars. A more accurate comparison would be to the semiconductor industry, which was also expected to create a boom in high-tech jobs but today employs mainly robots. Green-tech workers—people who do things like design and build wind turbines or solar panels—now make up only 0.6 percent of the American workforce. McKinsey figures that clean energy won’t command much more of the total job market in the years ahead. “The bottom line is that these ‘clean’ industries are too small to create the millions of jobs that are needed right away,”