Texas—yes, Texas—has the most clean energy jobs in the country

Texas’s role as the capital of American petropolitics hasn’t stopped it from becoming a clean energy leader.

The state was roughly tied with California as the largest employer for non-remote clean energy jobs in the country between June and August of this year, according to a Fast Company analysis of jobs listings aggregated by Google. It accounted for 7% of the total listings, edging out California, at 6.9%, by a very slight margin.

In fact, five of the top 15 states with the most clean energy job listings voted for Trump in the 2024 election, despite the incoming president's promises to freeze further subsidies from the Inflation Reduction Act that have cultivated clean energy markets in red states.

Fast Company's jobs data aligns with previous analyses. In 2023, the Department of Energy said that Texas had the highest rate of clean energy jobs in the country, growing 6% year over year. And as Jay Turner, professor of environment studies at Wellesley College posted on Bluesky, "78% of $126.3 billion in post-IRA investments in batteries, EVs, wind, and solar supply chains have gone to Republican districts."

The clean energy job openings in Texas are disproportionately weighted towards working class positions that don't require bachelor's or associate's degrees: 49% of the job openings in the state are for technicians primarily in the wind and solar industries, and for salespeople who primarily sell solar panels directly to households.

The IRA accelerated Texas’s clean energy expansion—but it didn't start it. In the late 1990s, the state deregulated its energy market, allowing customers to freely choose their electricity providers, which included clean energy options like wind and solar. That, combined with the build-out of the state's transmission lines in 2005 under then Governor Rick Perry to connect the sunny, windy expanses of West Texas to urban centers, meant that businesses and households could easily opt for cheap, renewable energy generated hundreds of miles away."Really, it's been a process of over 20 years," says Matt Boms, executive director of the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance, a clean energy trade group. "Renewables have definitely benefited from that kind of free market framework that Texas is famous for."

This means that even under the previous Trump administration, Texas was already in the process of growing its carbon-free electricity generation infrastructure. Between 2012 and 2021, the state roughly doubled the amount of solar-generated electricity every year, going from 0.1 MWh to 14.9 MWh annually during that time span.

And the state's energy demands are only poised to grow, due to the continued influx of both people and companies, including tech companies building energy intensive data centers. Everyone wants to keep the lights on and the servers running for the lowest cost possible.

Texas's dual dominance in both clean energy and red-state politics is instructive in how a state can grow its carbon-free energy capacity regardless of where it falls on the political spectrum. "Energy is not inherently political," says Boms. "These are just technologies. They're not painted red or blue. This is long term, and driven by economics."

Interested in reading more about the clean energy job market? Check out Fast Company's full data analysis on Where the Clean Energy Jobs Are.