Businesses across the country are having difficulties filling open positions as the "return to normal" initiative gains traction.
Many are quick to point fingers and blame others for this growing problem.
There’s many reasons why this is happening, including but not limited to: a continuing pandemic that has taken more than 750,000 lives, increased hostility from customers to service industry employees, lack of skills and remote roles, low and unlivable wages, and dozens of other reasons we could spend a whole day explaining.
Just like every other industry, the renewable energy industry is experiencing its own labor shortage problems as it continues to grow at a rapid rate, additionally spurred by bigger pushes at the federal and state level to increase the amount of renewable energy initiatives available. This means renewable energy companies must find alternative ways to handle the increased demands without sacrificing safety or quality. However, this puts them in a unique position to help solve the labor shortage crisis.
A major portion of any renewable energy project is the construction phase. Maintaining safety protocol and quality projects requires skilled and knowledgeable construction workers. They're essentially the backbone of every renewable project, exerting hard labor every day to be able to put together and bring these projects to life. They're our eyes in the sky and adapt to varying weather and land conditions and are integral to influencing the solutions to the different challenges that can pop up at any given moment. You could even say they're the unsung heroes of the projects (however, at ClearPath Energy we make sure our construction crews know they are a valuable asset to our team.)
How ClearPath Energy is Making a Difference
During the construction phase of our community solar projects we employ local trained electricians and tradesmen to bring jobs to the local economy. We do this to benefit the communities in two ways- bringing a community solar project that the town's residents can subscribe to and save money while also employing tradesmen from the community, ensuring that as much revenue and jobs stay within the community. With some of our projects most will transition to different job sites dependent on the workload and project timeline of each site.
Our community solar projects have a project lifetime of 25 to 45 years. To ensure they’re running as needed they need to be checked for maintenance a few times a year to fix any problems and bugs and prevent any major problems from occurring. This will require several employees to conduct these per site. As we expand into new towns and states we will need to hire multiple local employees per site over the course of the project timeline, thus creating long-term jobs.
Our growing project sites also provides an opportunity for recent high school graduates and seasoned tradesmen. As the number of concurrent projects grows we will need to contract more tradesmen to keep up with project sizes, safety guidelines, and timelines. We hope that this helps bolster the number of people choosing the trades career route to fill much-needed jobs for not only our own projects but for projects across the nation.
