Texas is building a third of America’s clean energy. It has less than a tenth of the workers.
Texas holds 32% of the solar, wind and storage capacity scheduled to be built in the US, but only 9% of the people who already work in the field. Plus: where the entry-level jobs are, the credentials employers actually ask for, and this month’s role to watch.
The numbers in this report are a message to every training program in the country: the projects are coming faster than the people to build them. Texas alone has 68.9 GW on the way. I’d love to see more schools building pathways straight into these roles, and we want to work with programs ready to do just that.
Where it’s being built vs. where the workers are
Texas has 68.9 GW of solar, wind and storage scheduled to be built — more than the next five states combined — and 56,958 people working in solar, wind, storage and smart grid today. California has more than twice the workforce (139,565) and under a third of the pipeline.
What the gap looks like
- Texas has 1.2 GW on the way for every 1,000 clean energy workers — about 3.4 times the national rate of 0.35 GW.
- California is the reverse: 23% of the country’s clean energy workers and 9% of its pipeline.
- Arizona and Oregon are building fast relative to their workforces too, at 0.98 and 0.86 GW per 1,000 workers.
- Wyoming is the extreme case: 6.6 GW planned and 775 people working in the field today.
- Most of the build is still ahead. About 74% of the Texas pipeline is scheduled for 2027 or later, and its most common openings today are field roles — wind turbine technicians, solar O&M and battery storage technicians.
- What it means for job seekers: if you want hands-on field work on utility-scale projects, the states building fastest relative to their workforce are where demand is most likely to grow.
What field and trade roles pay
74% of open roles publish a salary range. Lineworkers lead field roles by a wide margin. Wind turbine technicians — Texas’s most common opening — post a median of $58,760 nationally. Each role links to its full benchmark, with the percentile range and pay by state.
Solar is the easiest way in. Storage and hydrogen are the hardest.
About one in four solar roles is entry level. In battery storage and hydrogen it’s fewer than one in twenty, so expect to need field or electrical experience before moving into those sectors.
The credentials employers actually name
Counted across every open US posting. NERC certification — for grid and control-room work — tops the list, and journeyman-level experience or a CDL comes up far more often than most people expect. NABCEP, the credential the solar industry promotes most, is named in only 22 postings.
Wind turbine technician
The people who climb, inspect and repair wind turbines. It is Texas’s most common clean energy opening right now, and employers are hiring for it in 26 states.
Texas has 40 openings — more than the next three states combined. Vestas posts 72 of the 154 roles, followed by NextEra Energy (33) and Invenergy (20). Pay is tightly bunched: the middle half of advertised salaries sits within a few thousand dollars of the median.
Almost every posting asks for a valid driver’s license (97%) and the ability to climb, and 39% mention travel between sites. 12 roles are advertised as entry level, so there are openings for people just out of training, though most postings want some field experience.
How this report is built. Figures are open US job postings on Verde Talent on October 5, 2026, across the 80 energy companies we track; 44 had US roles open. Pay is the median of what postings advertise, not offers made or salaries paid. Credential counts are postings whose title or description names the credential. Planned capacity is the EIA generator inventory, solar, wind and storage only (213 GW nationally). The workforce figure is the U.S. Energy & Employment Report (2026 edition) county data for solar, wind, storage and smart grid; counties with fewer than ten workers in a technology are counted as zero, so it is conservative. The open-jobs total includes a small number of roles outside the US; everything else in this report is US only. This first edition has no month-on-month comparison; from November, each report compares with the previous one, counting only employers tracked in both months.