Smart grid jobs? You better believe it

By Liz Enbysk SGN Managing Editor   A recent report from the Brookings Institution and Battelle provided an eye-opening analysis of the clean economy / green jobs space. "Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment" concludes that the so-called clean economy employs some 2.7 million workers in the U.S. But here's the rub. According to the report:

Most clean economy jobs reside in mature segments that cover a wide swath of activities including manufacturing and the provision of public services such as wastewater and mass transit. A smaller portion of the clean economy encompasses newer segments that respond to energy-related challenges. These include the solar photovoltaic (PV), wind, fuel cell, smart grid, biofuel, and battery industries.

So we decided to zero in on that last line and take a deeper dive. We've been hearing for years, of course, that a labor shortage is looming in the electric utility industry as retirements take a toll. And a report released June 30 by the Task Force on America's Future Energy Jobs at the Bipartisan Policy Center confirms that. It suggests new workers will be needed to fill as many as one-third of the nation’s 400,000 current electric power jobs by 2013. And there's some doubt that there will be enough workers with the skill sets required – particularly as utilities deploy new technologies in the smart grid and renewables arena. Seems the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center may be onto something with its initiative this year that placed 100 paid interns at 70 clean energy companies across the state.

But what we wanted to know is, what's the story today? What's happening right now? News headlines continue to paint a pretty grim picture about the U.S. job market overall. Yet we've seen some encouraging snippets in our corner of the job world. In May we talked about smart grid hiring fever at Siemens and earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported Siemens USA has 400 open positions in its building technologies division. We noticed a post on LinkedIn the other day about Telvent Utilities seeking smart grid talent.

So we took a cruise through more than 20 jobs sites, a combination of electric utilities and vendors in the smart grid space. Bottom line: There are openings – lots of them, it would seem. And in the case of utilities, while we did find openings for some of the more traditional utility jobs – linemen and meter readers, for instance – we also found jobs in the smart grid arena. (And no surprise here, several utilities have openings for in-house recruiters.)

Here are the utilities and companies we researched. We've included a link to their job sites along with just a couple of the jobs posted in the last few weeks to give you an idea of what's out there.

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Accenture: Smart grid DMS manager, Change management manager/resources-energy

Ambient: Commissioning/energy audit team leader, Project manager

Austin Energy: SCADA/EMS control engineering manager, Information security analyst

Beacon Power: Interconnection manager, Project manager

Comverge: Operations manager, Energy engineer

Consert: Utility program manager, Senior integration engineer

Consolidated Edison New York: System and transmission engineer, Substation operations manager

Coulomb Technologies: Customer support engineer, Senior solutions engineer

Duke Energy: Project  manager smart grid, Production team leader wind farm, Distribution engineering associate

Echelon: Product manager smart metering, Applications engineer

EnerNOC: Energy engineer, Senior automation energy

Florida Power & Light: Wind technician, Senior NERC compliance specialist

GE smart grid: Design engineer – home energy management, Cyber security - senior software security analyst, Electric power systems engineer

Grid Net: Front end engineer, Director of utility sales

KEMA: Energy storage testing engineer, Principal consultant, power generation and renewables

Omaha Public Power District: Supervisor regulatory compliance, Principal substation engineer

Opower: Automation architect, User experience designer

Puget Sound Energy: Energy advisor, Energy management engineers

S&C Electric: Application engineer - power systems/ renewables, Manager - communications systems projects

San Diego Gas & Electric: Security engineer, Engineering analyst

Silver Spring Networks: Director, grid reliability applications, Software performance engineer

SmartSynch: Senior applications developer, ZigBee firmware engineer

Tantalus: Senior field support engineer, Field project manager

What's your take on the smart grid job market today? Are you seeing growth in your company? Feel free to add comments using the Talk Back form below.