India’s expanding clean energy workforce: opportunities in the solar and wind energy sectors

Job creation, skill development and COVID recovery are key priorities for the Indian government. Jobs created in the renewable energy (RE) market offer a significant opportunity to meet the government’s multiple goals of employment generation, clean energy expansion, and economic development. This analysis uses the workforce numbers, job-years per megawatt (MW), and full time equivalent (FTE) coefficients calculated in earlier reports from data collected in 2017. This report provides updated findings and recommendations geared toward India’s goal of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel electricity generation capacity, including 450 GW of RE, by 2030. Some of the key findings include India can potentially create about 3.4 million jobs (short and long term) by installing 238 GW solar and 101 GW new wind capacity to achieve the 500 GW non-fossil electricity generation capacity by 2030 goal. These jobs represent those created in the wind and on-grid solar energy sectors. A workforce of about one million can be employed to take up these green jobs. Jobs created are different from the workforce needed, as one worker can perform more than one job. As of FY21, the wind and solar energy sectors employ a workforce of 111,400. The solar sector (utility-scale and rooftop solar) continued to employ the majority of this workforce with a 77 percent share (85,900) whereas wind accounted for 23 percent share (25,000).