June 2026

Plug into employment trends in electric power generation, 2000–25

This article uses Current Employment Statistics (CES) data to examine trends in electric power generation employment between 2000 and 2025. In particular, the recent shift in nonfossil fuel electric power generation employment outpacing fossil fuel electric power generation employment is highlighted. The article then uses Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) data to analyze how changing demand for different sources of power generation, including nuclear and renewable energy, have contributed to this shift.

With the flip of a switch, the lights turn on. This simple comfort of modern life exists thanks to the hard work of employees in the electric power generation industry. From 2000 to 2025, power plants adjusted their employment in response to changing fuel supply and power demand. Electric power generation is a vital, albeit relatively small, industry made up of establishments whose primary economic activity is producing electricity.¹ These establishments convert energy from a single fuel or combination of fuels into electricity before transporting it through transmission lines or distribution systems to consumers.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey, employment in electric power generation trended down from the inception of the series in 1990 through 2020.² The decline between 1990 and 2000 was largely due to firms’ reactions to deregulation and increased competition.³ This article focuses on trends in private electric power generation employment, discussing the overall decline in the industry’s employment from 2000 to 2020 and the rise in employment after 2020 for establishments that do not use fossil fuels. Data from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) are used later in the article to examine the changes in demand for different sources of power generation, including nuclear and renewable energy.

Comparing fossil fuel and nonfossil fuel electric power generation employment, 2000–25

Electric power generation (EPG) employment was lower in 2025 than it was at the start of the millennium. (See chart 1.) In January 2000, employment in the industry was just under 200,000. Employment fell by 28,000 over the next decade and then declined by an additional, though more moderate, 13,000 by January 2025. This overall decrease reflects a few trends across the industry. For example, power plants have become more efficient amid an aging workforce.⁴ In addition, the United States has moved away from energy-intensive manufacturing and modern appliances are using less energy, slowing the growth of electricity demand.⁵

The CES electric power generation industry is made up of two subcomponent industries: (1) fossil fuel electric power generation (fossil fuel EPG) and (2) hydroelectric and nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and other electric power generation (which, for the sake of brevity, this article refers to as nonfossil fuel EPG). Employment in these two industries declined between 2000 and 2020. Fossil fuel EPG employment dropped by 35,000, or 30 percent, between January 2000 and January 2020. Nonfossil fuel EPG employment dropped by a smaller amount (19,000), but by a similar percentage (24 percent). After 2020, employment trends in these two industries diverged sharply. Fossil fuel EPG employment remained steady at a level of around 75,000 jobs from January 2021 to December 2025. Nonfossil fuel EPG employment, on the other hand, soared from a level of 63,000 in January 2021 to 86,000 in December 2025—a growth of 36 percent. As of December 2025, employment in nonfossil fuel EPG was 11,000 higher than employment in fossil fuel EPG.

Analysis by type of power generation: fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and renewable energy

Jobs in different types of power generation—fossil fuel, nuclear energy, and renewable energy—have their own impacts on employment levels in both the EPG industry as a whole, and on the employment gap between the fossil fuel EPG and nonfossil fuel EPG subcomponent industries.

Fossil fuels

Coal was once the dominant fuel in EPG for the United States. In the 1970s, the United States built many coal plants to reduce energy dependence during the oil crisis.⁶ Coal was relatively cheap and domestically produced at the time, but in the 21st century, coal plants have become more expensive because of age, rising emission regulations, and shifting coal prices.⁷ These costs encouraged a substantial amount of coal-fired capacity to retire after 2000, reducing the number of coal-fired establishments where people could work. From 2014 to 2024, the number of electric utility coal-fired plants in the United States declined by 49 percent.⁸ When coal plants retired, customers had to turn to other plants for power. If renewable energy was not cost-effective or convenient, utilities turned to other fossil fuels, with the exception of petroleum—evidenced by petroleum-fueled plants generating less than 1 percent of the country’s total power generation in 2025.⁹ Rather, it was more popular to replace coal plants with natural gas.

Natural gas prices have changed dramatically from 2005 to 2025, shaping the number of power plants the commodity primarily fuels. Natural gas was once more expensive than oil and coal.¹⁰ Then, in the early 2000s, gas developers began combining directional drilling technology and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) to extract natural gas. This technology improved access to large amounts of gas in shale formations throughout the United States.¹¹ The increased supply made natural gas cheaper; the price of natural gas just about halved from 2008 to 2009.¹² Natural gas plants also incorporated combined-cycle technology, which increased efficiency. Finally, natural gas produced less than half as many carbon emissions as coal for the same amount of electricity, aiding utilities in meeting carbon emissions standards.¹³ These factors made natural gas cheaper than coal, resulting in electric companies switching from coal to gas. In 2016, natural gas was the most used fuel for generating electricity and has maintained that position ever since.¹⁴

Employment declines in fossil fuel EPG stabilized in 2005, the period when natural gas-fired power plants became more popular. The rise of these plants may have buoyed the fossil fuel workforce. Eventually, as natural gas plants became more efficient and plants fired by other fossil fuels like coal, oil, and petroleum continued to retire, employment in fossil fuel EPG fell faster than employment in nonfossil fuel EPG after 2014, closing the gap in employment between the two industries.

Why was nonfossil fuel EPG slow to grow, even with increased pressure to reduce carbon emissions? Data from the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program offer valuable insight when analyzing nonfossil fuel EPG employment.¹⁵ Both CES and QCEW produce employment data by industry from establishments that pay state unemployment insurance, but the two differ in certain aspects—one is that QCEW is a near-population count, while CES estimates employment data from a sample of establishments drawn using QCEW as the sample frame. This difference means that QCEW is able to publish more detailed data series than CES, though with a timing lag.¹⁶ Whereas CES only publishes the two previously discussed subcomponent industries of EPG, QCEW publishes eight. Among the eight industries, seven do not use fossil fuels as their primary means of generating electricity, which allows us to see more detailed trends. The following nuclear energy and renewable energy sections of this article discuss QCEW employment. Note that as of the publication of this article, the QCEW data for 2025 are preliminary.

Nuclear energy

Nuclear power is a nonfossil fuel electric power generator whose recent history mirrors that of coal. Similar to coal plants, the United States built several nuclear power plants in the 1970s to further aid in relieving the oil crisis. In the decades since, nuclear power plants grew less popular due to their high operating costs and stringent regulations.

Utility companies are often reluctant to close a nuclear plant unless the plant is truly insolvent. Nuclear power plants serve a vital purpose as baseload plants, running nearly all the time to provide a constant level of electricity that other plants can add to as demand increases. No nuclear reactors were shut down between 1996 and 2013, but twelve closed in the following decade.¹⁷ The closure of these reactors likely negatively impacted employment. Around 2013, industry employment trended downwards as reactors across the country shut down. (See chart 2.) Dividing QCEW’s employment count for the nuclear EPG industry by the number of nuclear establishments in 2025 estimates an average of 192 jobs per establishment—the most of any EPG industry.¹⁸ Each nuclear reactor has a sizable number of jobs per establishment, so, closing even a few has a large effect on total employment.

Recent developments have spurred speculation about a potential “nuclear renaissance.” Technology, like data centers that draw massive amounts of power all day and electric vehicles that charge at traditionally low load times, is warping electricity demand.¹⁹ Some analysts posit that such changes support renewed investment in baseload generators, particularly those fueled by uranium. Some tech companies have already begun looking into building their own private nuclear generators to support their computer and server facilities. Presently, however, nuclear energy has lost its prominence as a nonfossil fuel EPG employer. In 2012, before any recent U.S. reactor closures, nuclear EPG employment was about 80 percent of total nonfossil fuel employment. Ten years and a loss of almost 15,000 jobs later, nuclear EPG employment was only 53 percent of nonfossil fuel EPG’s total employment. This declining share of employment between 2012 and 2022 reflected both the loss of nuclear generation jobs and the growth of renewable energy jobs.

Renewable energy

Employment in renewable EPG changed little until 2020, partially because not every renewable energy job is a job in utilities. Renewable EPG has a larger share of jobs in construction than in utilities, as many projects are newer or require few daily staff. For example, the U.S. Department of Energy reports that in 2024, 4 percent of employment in establishments working with solar EPG was in utilities, while 49 percent was in construction.²⁰ Furthermore, EPG establishments are not the only ones providing electricity from renewable resources to the United States. If a private citizen chooses to install solar panels on their roof, their house does not become an EPG establishment, and they are not included in the industry’s employment. In fact, that citizen may then sell excess electricity back to the grid, reducing electricity demand from utility-scale plants and potentially limiting the number of employees hired.

Despite the caveats around what percentage of renewable energy employment may be counted in the utilities industry, there has been an increase in nonfossil fuel EPG employment. (See chart 3.) This growth is visible in QCEW’s reporting of its subcomponents, particularly for solar and wind EPG. Solar EPG employment more than quadrupled between January 2020 and December 2025. Solar EPG grew largely because of solar energy’s comparatively low cost. Tax credits for companies involved with renewable energy and relatively inexpensive solar panels have made solar EPG an attractive investment for anyone wishing to grow renewable energy capacity.²¹ It takes several years for a new project to connect to the grid, delaying effects, but by January 2022, solar EPG employed more workers than any other renewable industry. Wind energy has benefited from similar reductions in costs. Wind EPG employment expanded by 128 percent between January 2020 and December 2025. Because of strength in both wind EPG and solar EPG, starting in 2022, renewable energy generated more electricity than coal.²²

Charging up and looking ahead

It would be difficult for the United States to ever be completely powered by solar and wind energy. These two fuels are intermittent, as they generate electricity only when their resource is immediately at hand and scientists have yet to discover how to store wind as easily as we store coal and liquid natural gas. When solar and wind are not present, other power plants must increase their output to meet demand. At other times, solar and wind may generate electricity when demand is low, increasing supply and thus decreasing the price of electricity for other establishments, potentially making those other facilities operate at a loss.²³ The United States may also need to invest in more energy storage to save additional electricity or transmission and distribution infrastructure to transport electricity from where those natural resources are abundant to where electricity demand is abundant.²⁴ Currently, solar jobs are concentrated in the western United States, with California claiming the most solar capacity while wind power is most prevalent in Texas and the Great Plains.²⁵ The location of generation matters not only logistically, but also because EPG jobs pay well: employees in EPG industries had average hourly earnings in excess of $62 an hour as of December 2025.²⁶ As the share of fossil fuel and nonfossil fuel jobs shifts, so may the location of these high-earning jobs.

Innovations in technology may have mixed results on employment. Newer power plants typically have more capacity than the older facilities they are replacing, reducing the number of power plants necessary to meet the same demand. Electricity providers are building a smart grid with automated sensors that detect hardware issues and balance electricity.²⁷ This smart grid may change the positions and skills needed to operate new technology. Externally, large data centers and electric vehicles may grow electricity demand. The BLS Employment Projections program projects that solar EPG and wind EPG will add 39,500 jobs between 2024 and 2034, combined.²⁸ These projections reflect the grid’s expected transition to more renewable electricity capacity.

Conclusion

Electric power generation employment has declined from 2000 to 2025, as technology and the workforce have both evolved. At the beginning of the 2000s, natural gas prices dropped enough that natural gas supplanted coal as a power resource for many producers. A few years later, a similar story played out as a handful of aging and costly nuclear reactors closed while wind and solar infrastructure became cheap enough for private establishments to expand their use. These overlapping shifts have reduced the ratio between fossil fuel EPG employment and nonfossil fuel EPG employment. The EPG employment trends discussed throughout this article may inform ideas about the future to come as Americans rely more heavily on the power of the power industry.