There is a moment in every energy transition when abstraction gives way to livelihood, when policy targets become paychecks, when a rooftop panel becomes a career, when a community stops waiting for energy security and starts building it with its own hands. Around the world, and with particular momentum in India, that moment is no longer approaching. It has arrived and it is arriving across every clean energy sector simultaneously.
A multi-sector revolution, globally underway
The scale of what is unfolding defies conventional economic description. According to the IRENA-ILO Renewable Energy and Jobs Annual Review 2024, global renewable energy employment surged 18% in a single year from 13.7 million in 2022 to 16.2 million in 2023, the highest annual increase ever recorded. The IEA’s World Energy Employment 2025 report confirms the broader picture: the global energy workforce has crossed 76 million workers, with the electricity sector overtaking fossil fuels to become the world’s largest energy employer for the first time in history.
This is not a solar story alone. It is a story told across an entire ecosystem of technologies.
Solar PV continues to lead, adding over half a million jobs globally in 2023. Wind energy, despite headwinds in offshore turbine manufacturing, sustained its trajectory as nations scaled onshore capacity. Electric vehicle manufacturing added 410,000 jobs in a single year as automotive supply chains realigned around electrification. Bioenergy spanning liquid biofuels, biogas, and solid biomass remains one of the most distributed employment generators in the global energy system, with its inherently decentralised supply chain embedding livelihoods deep into agricultural communities. And green hydrogen, still in its commercial infancy, is already catalysing a new class of high-skill industrial employment in economies that are positioning early.
Women now make up approximately 40% of the solar PV workforce globally, nearly double the share in oil and gas. The clean energy economy is not just growing. It is growing more equitably than what it is replacing.
India: The most consequential clean energy jobs story in the world
Among all major economies tracked by the IEA, India recorded the highest energy employment growth rate in 2024 at 5.8% ahead of Indonesia, the Middle East, China, and every advanced economy. India’s renewable energy workforce surpassed 1.02 million in 2023, and hiring within the sector grew by a remarkable 23.7% in 2024 alone, according to TeamLease Services. Salaries in India’s solar sector already command a 20% premium over economy-wide averages. NITI Aayog projects this trajectory extends to over 10 million clean energy jobs by 2047.
What makes India’s story genuinely world-class, however, is its multi-sector breadth.
Solar remains the anchor. India’s installed solar capacity reached 119 GW by July 2025, with PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana the world’s largest domestic rooftop solar programme powering over 10 lakh homes, deploying 4,946 MW, and actively training one lakh Solar PV Technicians from within local communities. The monthly installation rate under the scheme now runs ten times higher than pre-programme levels.
Wind is fast becoming the second pillar. India ranked fourth globally in cumulative wind capacity at 44.7 GW in 2023, supporting over 52,200 direct workers 40% in operations and maintenance alone. States like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, and Rajasthan have made wind employment a structural feature of their regional economies.
Bioenergy and Bio-CNG are reshaping the rural jobs map. India’s biogas sector alone employs 85,000 people, with solid biomass supporting another 58,000. The national Bio-CNG push converting agricultural residue and organic waste into clean fuel is creating an entirely new category of green collar work for rural communities that has no analogue in fossil fuel employment. Every Bio-CNG plant built is a cluster of local jobs: feedstock collectors, plant operators, logistics workers, and maintenance technicians all rooted in the communities they serve.
Green Hydrogen is the frontier where India is moving with rare intentionality. The National Green Hydrogen Mission targets 5 million metric tonnes of annual production by 2030, and with it, 600,000 new jobs across the hydrogen value chain from electrolyser manufacturing to industrial application and export logistics. India’s first green hydrogen plant, commissioned by GAIL in Madhya Pradesh in May 2024, marks the transition from mission to momentum.
Electric Vehicles complete the picture. India’s EV manufacturing and charging infrastructure ecosystem is expanding rapidly, creating roles across engineering, assembly, service, and digital infrastructure jobs that are urban and peri-urban in nature, diversifying the geographic spread of clean energy employment beyond project sites.
The inclusive imperative
Across every sector, a common truth holds: the communities that engage earliest with the clean energy transition benefit most deeply from it. But community engagement does not happen automatically. It requires deliberate investment in workforce development, accessible training, and policies that channel economic benefit back to the localities where energy is generated.
The Skill Council for Green Jobs projects India’s potential at 3.5 million green jobs by 2047 across renewable energy, EVs, green construction, and sustainable industry. Reaching those potential demands that skilling infrastructure grows as fast as physical infrastructure.
This sector carries dual responsibility, to build clean energy capacity and to build the human capacity to sustain it. The first without the second is not a transition. It is merely a technology swap.
The clean energy economy that communities deserve is one where the person who installs the solar panel, services the wind turbine, operates the Bio-CNG plant, and assembles the EV battery all live within the communities their work powers.
That economy is being built. The question is the speed and inclusivity with which we build it.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.