New York state was the third-most productive state in announcing potential new clean energy and clean transportation jobs in 2014, according to a recent report issued by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2), an advocacy group that promotes environmentally friendly economic policies.
According to the report, 12 separate projects in the Empire State, announced last year, could create up to 7,175 total jobs in the clean energy and clean transportation fields. Most of those would be seen in the Buffalo (5,000 jobs) and Albany (1,000 jobs) areas.
In Central New York, fewer than 70 clean-energy jobs from two projects in the region were announced in 2014, according to the E2 website. Twenty jobs were announced last summer in Binghamton when Rensselaer–based Monolith Solar Associates, LLC, issued a news release on its website stating it plans to build a regional office in the city.
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The second jobs source was through a program run by the nonprofit Solar Tompkins — a community group that promotes the use of solar energy — which set out to double the total solar-generated, electric-power capacity of all homes and businesses in Tompkins County in the last year. The nonprofit posted on its website last November that the program was successful, and that it generated “43.5 new, permanent, full-time, living-wage jobs … in our communities in just the last 6 months.”
The press secretary for E2, Jeff Benzak, compiled the E2 report, and emphasized to CNYBJ that the data in the report is not exhaustive; not all projects and potential jobs have necessarily been counted.
The report, entitled “Clean Energy Works For Us: Q4 and Year-End 2014 Jobs Report,” found that nearly 47,000 clean energy and clean transportation jobs were announced at more than 170 projects across the U.S. in 2014.
That’s a significant decrease from the 78,000 announced jobs counted at 260 projects in E2’s 2013 report.
E2, in its news release, attributed the decline to the “ongoing uncertainty over public policy at both the federal and state levels, coupled with the expiration of beneficial tax policies, [which] cast a cloud over clean energy industries. This resulted in fewer announcements than in the past.”
Only Nevada and California outpaced New York last year, with 8,591 and 7,323 jobs, respectively, according to the report.
E2 is an affiliate of the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit, international environmental-advocacy group. It first began tracking clean jobs data in 2012.
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