Labor needs clean energy to do more than decarbonize the grid. At a time of stagnant growth and economic pessimism, the net zero mission is being framed as the government’s main tool for creating new skills and jobs in places long starved of investment and getting the economy moving again.
The government’s Clean Energy Work Plan suggests the transition could support up to 860,000 jobs by 2030, including 400,000 additional roles. But is this happening fast enough, Germany has twice as many renewable energy workers per capita as the UK. Denmark and Sweden also exceed UK labor capacity. These gaps reflect years of investment in skills, supply chains and manufacturing. The economy is playing catch-up.
The clean energy workforce is expanding, albeit from a relatively weak base. The ONS estimates there were 652,000 people employed in UK green jobs in 2024, an increase of more than a quarter on 2015 levels. Demand for such roles will only accelerate as long as the country remains committed to a net-zero path, increasing the risk that projects will move faster than the workforce needed to deliver them.
This gap between ambition and capacity goes through the transition. Workers should be trained before projects as well as after they start. Skills are required where the infrastructure is built, not concentrated elsewhere.
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Labour’s former director of industrial strategy and clean energy, Virginia Sentance, now a partner at Flint Global, argues that promise can obscure reality. “It’s not this misty bucket of green jobs we’ve got to do just grab it,” she told him. New statesmanThe last Ignite Growth Conference. “In most cases we’re talking about transitioning people’s existing jobs and lives to meet these changing needs.”
Sentance said this shows that the effects of net zero are no longer far-fetched or theoretical. “We are at the transition point where people are feeling the impacts,” she acknowledged. “We had a period where you could build infrastructure in a slightly abstract way, away from people. Now we’re talking about how it actually changes their lives – how they heat their homes, the cars they drive and often the jobs they do.”
This creates an economic and political challenge. Policies drawn up in Whitehall will only succeed if they translate into visible, local benefits – whether through new jobs, lower costs or improved services. People need to start seeing them soon, otherwise the transition risks appearing imposed rather than participatory, especially in communities already skeptical of economic change or perceived government overreach.
The transition will create new roles in offshore wind, nuclear, grid expansion and low-carbon heating. And much of that will depend on familiar professions adapting to new technologies: engineers moving from oil and gas rigs to wind farms, construction workers offering repairs as well as home building, electricians installing heat pumps instead of gas boilers.
The issue is not simply a shortage of workers, but a shortage with the right training, in the right places, at the right time. With the clean energy workforce growing rapidly, demand will be concentrated in sectors already facing recruitment pressures.
For Luke Murphy, Labor MP and a member of the Treasury Select Committee, this means focusing not only on new entrants but also on movement within the workforce. He called for “more proactive support for those reskilling, particularly for workers moving from other industries into the clean economy”.
Failure risks shortages at the point of delivery, increased costs, missed targets and missed opportunities for people to engage directly with the biggest behavioral and industrial change in living memory.
The regional dimension sharpens the challenge. The Labor Strategy places great emphasis on clusters, city regions, local supply chains and the industrial capacity needed to anchor them. Offshore wind in the north-east, carbon capture in industrial regions, nuclear in settled countries, electrified heat and transport in towns and cities – clean energy is inherently local.
But country-based growth does not automatically come from infrastructure investment. An offshore wind farm or new grid connection may bring few tangible benefits to nearby communities if labor is imported, supply chains are elsewhere, or training is too limited to connect local people to opportunities.
“Having an Office of Clean Energy Jobs is extremely important,” Murphy said of meeting this challenge, “along with investing in clusters across the country. Creating clean energy technical colleges of excellence is another important step.”
Given the scale of the work involved, do we prioritize the right metrics to measure success? Sam Alvis, associate director at IPPR, was skeptical about treating job creation as the main test of whether net zero is on track. Clean energy can generate local growth, he agreed, but “probably” that shouldn’t be the central focus. After all, politicians “have been talking about job creation over and over,” yet public enthusiasm has died down.
For Alvis, the problem was not only economic, but also perceptual. Voters tend to judge the transition not by long-term employment prospects but by its immediate effects on their lives. “People aren’t marking you at work,” he said. “They’re marking you on their bills.”
Even when investments bring new roles to an area, these benefits are not always attributed to government policy – or even recognized as part of the clean energy transition.
This creates a disconnect between the narrative of a jobs-led transition and the lived experience of communities. The government can point to overall employment gains, but individuals are more likely to notice whether local industries are expanding, whether family members are in secure jobs, and whether economic change feels stable or disruptive. The danger, Alvis suggested, is that a strategy built around future job creation fails politically because its benefits are too diffuse or delayed.
Murphy suggested that this will ultimately be the test of the government’s approach. While he has put some of the key pieces in place, he said, the outcome will depend on whether those plans translate into real improvements in people’s lives. “A big part of that is making sure jobs in the clean economy are of high quality and high standards so that people want to train or retrain in them.”
This is the limitation in Labour’s argument. Clean energy may offer a path to long-term growth, but its success will only be judged in the present.
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