Lots of UK oil and gas jobs are disappearing. Will enough green jobs emerged to replace them? It is a big local issue in Scotland in particular. The UK government’s view is that moving from oil and gas to green energy will cut emissions and make the economy, and energy prices, more stable. But not everyone agrees. For example, Reform UK plans to gut existing climate & green policies and expand gas and oil drilling. Though it’s been claimed that this would cause 500,000 job losses, rising to more than 1.4 million people put out of work by 2040, according to new research for Transition Economics.
However, it not at all clear if the drive to clean energy as currently planned will be sufficient to avoid net job losses. So some people could face real problems. Certainly, there will be a massive need for retraining- not least to avoid skill gaps opening up in the short term, as Terry Cook and I argued in a recent paper.
There are some good plans. Last year, the government announced that, as part of its clean energy jobs plan, it would establish five technical excellence colleges to focus training around the green energy sector. Now it has announced they will be the Colchester Institute, South Bank Technical College, London, the City of Liverpool College, the Education Collective, Redcar and the University Centre Somerset College Group. Between them they will offer training in training in areas such as offshore wind, solar, hydrogen & construction trades aligned with the clean energy jobs plan. And also, perhaps inevitably, nuclear, with Imperial College London to the fore. Other centres will look at other areas, including (maybe controversially) defence, not exactly green. But interestingly, in that context, Aurora is offering green skill conversion training for military service leavers to fit them for jobs in onshore and offshore wind.
The need for skills training for green jobs is not just a UK issue. As new energy technology spreads around the world, there are ‘Workforce readiness’ issues, as a good new study from the USA calls them. It says that education and training for clean/green technology (and it includes nuclear in that) represent the ‘missing lever for scaling climate technologies,’ and claim that ‘educational institutions—from community colleges, universities, to executive programs—are uniquely positioned to accelerate climate technology scale-up, but only if curricula more directly align with commercialization realities.’ So, for example, it looks to ‘building modular training programs that pair deep technical education with practical entrepreneurial experiences, such as internships with early-stage ventures, will prepare graduates to quickly adapt to evolving roles within dynamic start-up environments’.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have a key role to play in all this, an issue that Terry Cook and I explore in a new paper for Oxford University’s Clean Energy journal, expected to be out soon. In it, we note that there is an expansion of AI-driven training programmes in the UK, often mounted via collaborations between AI tech companies & energy sector firms, via degree level apprenticeships. For example E.ON, EDF & RWE use AI in their engineering & technician apprenticeships to train up the next generation of engineers on renewable energy and allied technologies including network systems and energy storage.
Of course, there are issues with AI, including its high energy use. But there are pressures to try to ensure that it makes use of renewable energy systems. For example, in a UK policy shift, flexible AI plants that can vary their demand so as to match renewable’s availability are being given priority treatment. And, globally, there is a new Green AI Data Centres coalition campaigning on these issues.
So far in the USA, AI seem to be powered most by electricity from gas fired plants, but solar and wind is also now being used, although there is also interest in using power from nuclear SMR plants, when and if any get going. Microsoft was also planning to use part of the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power its AI/data processing activities. TMI closed after the partial meltdown in 1979, but its part restart has been set back to 2031 due to grid connection issues. In the UK, the government, very optimistically, says that ‘Britain could see some of the world’s first advanced nuclear power stations powering factories & AI data centres, as part of the government’s “golden age” of nuclear to support jobs, drive growth & protect bill-payers with homegrown clean energy’. It is the process of stream-lining the nuclear regulatory framework to cut costs and speed up deployment of new nuclear/SMRs, much as is also happening in the USA under Trump, with AI use in mind. The worry is that the result will be a reduction in radiation safety standards for nuclear workers and also possibly the general public.
One way or another, the use of AI is opening up big new area of debate around the world. It is certainly likely to have a major impact on the energy system, as well as the environment - and also on employment. In our forthcoming paper we look critically at the potential role of AI for aiding (or hindering) green energy developments, arguing that, given the uncertainties about AI’s eco impacts, what is needed for AI in this context, and also more generally, is TA - Technology Assessment. Just what NATTA, the Network for Alternative Technology and Technology Assessment, Renew’s long-running home base, has been trying to do for Alternative Technology (AT) since it started up in 1976!
* The political scene is in some disarray after the recent UK local elections, with the Greens doing quite well, but Reform squeezing out Labour in many places. However, renewables are still favoured by most people. With skills gaps opening up in some technical areas, and people also exiting the oil and gas industries, it will be interesting to see if green energy employment and training issues will move up the national political agenda - especially in relation to the use of AI. The rapid expansion of employment in this sector seems vital, and that will require new and expanded training schemes.
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