US clean energy lost 36,949 jobs in 2025, the first drop since the pandemic

The US shed 36,949 clean energy jobs in 2025, the first annual decline since the pandemic. E2 analysed Department of Energy employment data, and Electrek reported the figures on 28 September. Clean energy employment fell to 3.52 million, erasing nearly 40% of the gains made in 2024.

E2 ties the drop to federal policy. The Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress rolled back support for clean energy and EVs. The group's project tracker recorded 142 clean energy manufacturing, generation and storage projects cancelled or downsized in 2025. Losses reached 35 states. California shed nearly 21,000 jobs, the most of any state, while Florida gained about 3,800. Battery storage and grid work, along with biofuels, posted small gains.

The wider US energy industry lost an estimated 86,000 jobs in 2025, according to the same DOE data. Clean energy accounted for roughly 43% of that decline, but remains the largest part of the energy workforce at more than 3.5 million people. Oil and gas employs 958,000, coal 125,000 and nuclear 70,000.

One caveat matters here. The employment figures show the extent of the decline. They do not establish how many of those jobs were lost to a particular policy change. E2's full Clean Jobs America 2026 report, with state and county detail, is not due until October.

Europe's bill is a price story, not a jobs story

Across the Atlantic, the pressure is running through prices. The Conversation noted on 29 September that the US crude hub price sat at US$66 a barrel in late February 2026, before the US and Israel attacked Iran, and reached $101 a barrel on 13 April after the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed. The authors, an energy economist and an international trade economist, trace where the extra money lands: mostly with oil companies, and in the Permian Basin, with shareholders through dividends, debt reduction, buybacks and drilling.

Higher crude feeds through to industry. The dossier's recent headlines point to diesel prices at all-time highs in the UK, the Rhine dropping below its shipping threshold, and INEOS idling Europe's last world-scale acetyls plant. Those are headline items rather than dossier facts, so treat them as context only.

The structural answer, if there is one, is electrification. Writing on her Substack on 29 September, Hannah Ritchie worked through numbers from Oxford professor Nick Eyre showing global final energy demand falling from 416 to 247 exajoules in a post-transition system, while electricity demand rises from 110 to 189 EJ. Electric cars convert around 80% of energy to motion against 20% for petrol. High-temperature industrial processes are the hard part, and around half of HGV distance and two-thirds of aviation are assumed to run on hydrogen instead.

Compute is the new load. CBC reported on 29 September that Newfoundland and Labrador's energy minister, Lloyd Parrott, said the province's door is "open for business" to AI data centres, and a department statement confirmed companies have approached the government. Tech journalist Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, told CBC the workloads are "really computationally intensive."

Efficient Computer said on 29 September it raised a $97M Series B led by TQ Ventures for energy-efficient processors. In its own post, the company argued that Amdahl's Law caps gains from specialized accelerators. Orange Business was selected as network partner for the EU's TESTA-EIRIS backbone, Light Reading reported on 29 September, promising 99.999% availability across at least 12 points of presence. Both are supply-side bets on the same constraint.