A new report form the Solar Foundation complements Energy Department numbers.

A solar advocacy group called the Solar Foundation released a report this week showing that the solar power industry in the US employs 260,077 workers that spend half or more of their time on solar industry-related projects—representing a growth of 24.5 percent from last year. The numbers were gleaned from an annual census that the foundation takes, this year involving more than 500,000 phone calls and 60,000 e-mails to “known and potential energy establishments across the United States.”

The Solar Foundation admitted that next year is unlikely to see as much dramatic growth, although total employment in the solar industry is still expected to increase by 10 percent to approximately 286,000 solar workers.

The employment numbers from the Solar Foundation were recently included in a January 2017 Department of Energy (DOE) report (PDF) on energy-related jobs. The DOE noted in its report that it's sometimes difficult to count solar industry jobs because people employed installing residential and commercial solar systems are counted differently from, say, people who work at a utility, operating utility-grade solar panels. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, utilities only employed 2,800 workers on solar-specific generation, but that figure hides construction and maintenance jobs on projects that are “financed, owned, or directed by utilities.” The DOE wrote that it estimates only 20.6 percent of people employed in the solar industry work on utility-level projects—another 54.6 percent work in residential solar, and the remaining 24.7 percent work on commercially-focused solar installations.
The DOE also points out that the solar industry is interesting because despite all that employment in distributed solar (that is, non-utility solar), utilities still have a lot more solar energy capacity than homes and businesses—roughly 28,081,000 MWh compared to distributed solar's 16,974,000 MWh in 2016. “This imbalance reflects the fact that utility-scale generation typically produces more MWh’s per labor unit installed compared to distributed generation,” the DOE writes.

Utility-scale solar is important, but the Solar Foundation admitted that the sector is not likely to grow as quickly next year as it did this year. The foundation wrote that the utility-scale market grew by more than 10GW in 2016, double the 4.26 GW added in 2015. But “this astronomical growth was triggered by the previous year’s anticipation of a 2016 phase-out of the 30 percent federal solar investment tax credit (ITC),” the Solar Foundation wrote. “In order to benefit from the ITC before it was presumed to expire at the end of 2016, projects needed to be completed by the end of the year.”

With the Trump Administration’s focus on fossil fuel, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a new federal solar tax credit soon, so utility-scale development will likely drop in 2017. But the Solar Foundation doesn’t forecast an especially precipitous drop in employment without the subsidies (although it admittedly has reason for rose-colored glasses). “Unsubsidized utility-scale development costs are at parity with natural gas in many states,” the Foundation says, which should keep demand for those kinds of projects strong, especially in states with renewable energy portfolio targets to hit, like in California or New York. The Foundation even gives a number—it expects utility-grade solar projects to shed a mere 173 jobs in 2017.

Interestingly, the Solar Foundation counts "predictability" as a reason utilities might want to move forward with solar. Predictability is not a word often associated with intermittent renewable resources like solar and wind, but the Foundation counts cost predictability as a value for utilities—where the markets for oil and even natural gas are susceptible to volatilities, the cost of operating solar panels changes comparatively little once it's installed.

As Ars wrote on Monday, solar power will have to play an integral part in our energy mix to stabilize atmospheric CO2 by 2050, and residential solar can factor into that. According to the Solar Foundation, a key factor in pushing residential solar forward will be developing new financing options for homes and businesses that want to install panels, reasoning that the decreasing price of solar panels have made leasing through an installer less attractive to homeowners who see owning their panels outright increasingly within financial reach.

In all, the Solar Foundation noted that 80 percent of the 51,000 solar-industry jobs added in 2016 were newly-created positions, and 20 percent were existing jobs that added a solar aspect to their responsibilities.

It’s admittedly hard to compare growth in the solar industry to other forms of renewable and non-renewable energy—after all, you can’t install a residential coal-fired power plant or a residential wind farm, and commercial geothermal projects are few and far between. But outside of solar, the DOE's January report noted that the nation’s wind technology sector grew 32 percent in 2016 to employ 101,738 workers, coal electricity generation and coal fuel production employed 160,119 in 2016, the petroleum industry employed 502,678, and natural gas grew by 6 percent since 2009 to now support 392,869 jobs.