The manufacturing job count could grow to 579,000 by 2030 if the other announced factory projects get built and come online. Total job count doesn’t confirm how desirable the work is, but these jobs happen to pay quite well, especially solar manufacturing salaries, which averaged $134,000 in 2024.
A Canary Media visit to the enormous QCells solar factory in Dalton, Georgia, last year showed why this work pays more than traditional manufacturing. The brand-new factories leverage considerable automation and robotic assistance for the heavy lifting and repetitive, high-precision tasks. Workers patrolled the lines and intervened when the machinery needed help. That greater output of an in-demand, high-tech product supported considerably higher pay than the carpet factories down the road.
“This is not our parents’ generation’s manufacturing,” Shiao said. “There is automation, there is robotics, there is AI in these facilities. And that’s a good thing, because these are high-tech, high-skill opportunities that are being brought into some of these communities that are really eager to find ways to keep their best, keep their brightest in the places that they grow up in.”
Across cleantech factories, annual earnings from clean energy manufacturing averaged $118,000, the study found, well above the average U.S. worker’s pay of $76,000.
It’s not just immediate employees who benefit, though. First comes the intensive but temporary construction phase. Once complete, the factories create additional work for support services in the region, such as shipping and delivery companies, food vendors, hotels for visiting customers, and waste disposal. Domestic manufacturing also relies on other component suppliers: Utility-scale solar panels sit on American steel trackers, covered in U.S.-made solar glass. The authors calculate that each job in a clean energy factory leads to three more in supporting industries.
This reality sounds a lot like the vision that Trump campaigned on last year, of growing jobs at home by restoring U.S. manufacturing from the ravages of globalization. He also repeatedly emphasizes a desire to secure more critical minerals for the U.S.; clean energy technologies provide much of the expected demand growth for those minerals.
“This administration talks a lot about an all-of-the-above energy strategy that facilitates American energy dominance,” Shiao said. “I think there needs to continue to be that recognition that solar, wind, energy storage are key pieces and critical pieces to realizing that growth, certainly in terms of the speed at which those projects can be deployed.”
The Ways and Means budget proposal dealt a blow to the cleantech industry’s hopes for a predictable investment landscape. It was also the opening volley of a weekslong negotiating process that will soon involve the Senate as well. Amid all that uncertainty, ACP has at least provided some fresh numbers on the value clean energy factories have created in their short moment of ascendancy, as well as helped clarify what’s at stake.
“We think we’ve got a winning message, one that is bringing positivity, and of course, economic growth to the country,” said John Hensley, ACP’s senior vice president of markets and policy analysis. “We’re going to continue to tell that story, and hopefully it lands on ears that are willing to listen.”
